Category: Thought

If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that we as a culture are in denial about our own mortality and the inevitability of our own death. The fact that we have a 78-year-old president, perhaps ironically, is a symptom of that. Only a culture in denial about death and mortality could be stupid enough to put a 78-year-old man in office.

Matt Walsh, The Matt Walsh Show, Ep. 687; “Is It Time We Put An Upper Age Limit On The Presidency?” (March 26, 2021).

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775, speech at  St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.

[U]nless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Aldous Huxley, foreword to a later edition of Brave New World (first published 1932).

One would have thought that in these anti-monopoly days, when the calamities resulting from selfish legislation have awakened public attention, men would take especial care not to permit anything involving an approach to exclusive privileges, to make its appearance upon the political arena, without raising a vigorous outcry against it. But the expectation is not realised. The doctrine that it is the duty of the state to protect the public health, contains the germ of another gigantic monopoly.

Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere of Government, Letter IX (W. Brittain of London, 1843), first appearing serially in The Nonconformist.

[T]he complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.

Peter Drucker (1939), as cited in The Road to Serfdom (Condensed Edition, March 1944), by F.A. Hayek.

On passing from a free country into one that is not free, the traveller is struck by the change; in the former, all is bustle and activity; in the latter, everything seems calm and motionless. In the one, amelioration and progress are the topics of inquiry; in the other, it seems as if the community wished only to repose in the enjoyment of advantages already acquired.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1.

Socialism — that is the State substituting itself for individual liberty and growing to be the most terrible of tyrants.

Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (September 12, 1848), published as the epigraph to Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism (1894).

Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.

It cannot be repeated too often that nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. It is not so with despotism: despotism often promises to make amends for a thousand previous ills; it supports the right, it protects the oppressed, and it maintains public order. The nation is lulled by the temporary prosperity that it produces, until it is roused to a sense of its misery. Liberty, on the contrary, is generally established with difficulty in the midst of storms; it is perfected by civil discord; and its benefits cannot be appreciated until it is already old.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1.

Dear Mother, please don’t worry . . . 

Today is the day 

That I protect you for a change.

From “Island’s Sunrise,” an alternative rock anthem of the Sunflower Student Movement.