Category: Thought

Where there are no rights, there are no duties.

“I don’t know nothin’, but I suspect a lot of things.”

Nature having made men unequal, by giving stronger bodily and mental powers to one than to another, the end of government ought to be, to destroy this inequality by protecting the weak. Instead of which, it has always leaned to the opposite side, wearing itself out by disregarding the first principle of its organization.

Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), p. 7.

I interviewed Fidel Castro once and he immediately turned anti-American. Of course, it may have been coincidental.

Jack Paar, host of The Tonight Show (1957-1962), as quoted in Jesse Walker, “When Fidel Castro Went on The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show,” Reason, November 28, 2016.

The true and equitable law of humanity is the free exchange of service for service. Spoliation consists in destroying by force or by trickery the freedom of exchange, in order to receive a service without rendering one.

Frédéric Bastiat, “The Natural History of Spoliation,” in Economic Sophisms: Second Series (1848).

Society . . . as it becomes more enlightened, should be very careful not to establish bodies of men who must necessarily be made foolish or vicious by the very constitution of their profession.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter one.