Category: Thought

[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.