The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state’s power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.
Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History.
There are people who are known to be very liberal, yet they never give without scolding or pride or even insolence.
John Calvin, De Vita Hominis Christiani, 1550.
It is striking, when you think about it, just how often politicians invoke ‘the intel community’ when they’re lying to you.
Tucker Carlson, on Tucker Carlson Tonight (Fox News, August 19, 2021).
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
Thomas Szasz, in The Second Sin (1973), “Science and Scientism,” p. 115.
Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed, to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.
The easy way to tell which side is wrong: . . . it’s the side that shoots its dissidents. If they do that, you can pretty much count on the fact that they are wrong.
Professor Jonathan Haidt, in conversation with PhilosophyInsights, “What is Going on with Diversity Training (DEI)?” (August 15, 2015).
Why do tourists gape so eagerly at this sort of thing? Most people, I believe, aspire to what these agents and sycophants of the state achieved: ease without work, services for themselves by edict, power and position by wishing plus, of course, a little intrigue.
Leonard Read’s Journals, August 16, 1950, referring to the Château de Fontainebleau, one of the largest of France’s royal châteaux.
Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autrui.
We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678).
Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Article 23 of Declaration of Rights (1812).
Nobody would work for starvation wages if he were not in a situation in which he preferred such wages to not working at all.