A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute.
From the novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury.
Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.
George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903).
Don’t ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.
Dagny Taggart to Hank Rearden in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), p. 297.
Il faut beaucoup de philosophie pour observer
les faits qui sont trop près de nous.
Much philosophy is needed for the correct observation of things which are before our eyes.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as quoted by Frédéric Bastiat, Harmonies of Political Economy (1850).
Among the new arrangements that feeble mortals are invited to make trial of, there is one that is presented to us in terms worthy of attention. Its formula is: Association voluntary and progressive.
But political economy is founded exactly on the datum that society is nothing else than association (such as the above three words describe it) — association, very imperfect at first, because man is imperfect; but improving as man improves, that is to say, progressive.
Frédéric Bastiat, “Natural and Artificial Organizations (Journal des Economistes, January 1848), and later in Harmonies of Political Economy, book 1, chapter 1 (1850).
The operation of burning it was perhaps as odious as that of writing it. . . . If the book was dangerous, it should have been refuted. To burn a book of argument is to say: ‘We do not have enough wit to reply to it.’
François-Marie Arouet, self-styled as Voltaire, referring to the burning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social in Geneva, in his undated pamphlet, Idées républicaines (Republican ideas).
What private property does is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce for more. Then, if there’s a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.
Subversion is an activity which is a two-way traffic. You cannot subvert an enemy which does not want to be subverted.
Soviet defector (KGB propaganda expert; former Novosti Press journalist)Yuri Bezmenov, lecturing as Tomas David Schuman.
The last person to trust with power is someone who is dying to have it. The best person to wield power is someone who is reluctant to do so, but who will do it for a while as a civic duty. That is why term limits should make it impossible to have a whole career in politics.
There’s no business that’s too small for government to torture.