That freedom was a right, that the very first of the natural rights of man was to be free and to belong only to himself, would seem to be self-evident, and yet thousands of years had to pass before the glorious thought was generally accepted, and the nations of earth had the courage to proclaim it.
Jules Verne, Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (1881), p. 2.
Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.
Cato the Elder, as quoted in Plutarch’s Life of Cato.
No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.
Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Authorship” in The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer (T. Bailey Saunders, translator).
Most of the conflicts the world has seen in the past ten decades have not been called forth by princely ambition or ministerial conspiracy but through the passionate agitation of public opinion, which through the press and parliament has swept along the executive.
Bernhard von Bülow, as quoted in “Karl Kraus, the Press, and War” (International Policy Digest, March 27, 2014), by Franz-Stefan Gady. Von Bülow (1849 – 1929), created Fürst von Bülow in 1905, was a German statesman who served as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs for three years and then as Chancellor of the German Empire from 1900 to 1909.
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).
[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.