Category: Thought

For most clueless Americans, the State is now their God and the US dollar is their faith proposition.  Modern Americans have never lived under the limited government spelled out in the Constitution.

Bill Sardi, “Did You Make a Conscious Choice To Be a Liberal, Conservative or Libertarian? Probably Not Where Are You in The Spectrum Of Political Thought?” LewRockwell.com (May 27, 2021).

Today we have ruling dynasties as well as fallen ones; princes wearing a crown and others who certainly would not mind a chance of wearing one. Each has his party, and each party is primarily interested in putting spokes in the wheels of the coach of the State, until they have tipped it up, thus gaining the chance of climbing into it themselves, risking the same fate in turn. It is the charming game of seesaw, which people pay the price for and yet never seem to tire of. . . .

Paul-Emile de Puydt, “Panarchy” (1860).

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals, with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Machiavelli” (March 1827), a review of Oeuvres completes de MACHIAVEL (J. V. Perier: 1825), in Critical and Historical Essays: Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans: 1843).

A journey of a thousand leagues starts with a single step.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 64, line 12.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Does anybody want to carry out a political schism? He should be able to do so but on one condition, namely, that he will do it within his own group, affecting neither the rights nor the creed of others.

Paul-Emile de Puydt, “Panarchy” (1860).

A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.

Associate Justice George Sutherland, Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233, 251 (1936).

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.

John Locke, Second Treatise on Government