Category: Thought

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.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859), Chapter Two: “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion.”

AFTER the general idea of virtue, I know no higher principle than that of right; or rather these two ideas are united in one. The idea of right is simply that of virtue introduced into the political world. It was the idea of right that enabled men to define anarchy and tyranny, and that taught them how to be independent without arrogance, and to obey without servility. The man who submits to violence is debased by his compliance; but when he submits to that right of authority that he acknowledges in a fellow creature, he rises in some measure above the person who gives the command.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1.

Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature. The techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.

But, as I think it was Metternich said many years ago, ‘you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.’ If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, its exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them. It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy (who have always existed and presumably will always exist) to get people to love their servitude. This is the . . . ultimate in malevolent revolutions….

Aldous Huxley, speech,“The Ultimate Revolution,” March 20, 1962.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Hello? Uh, hello? Hello, Dmitri? Listen, I can’t hear too well, do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? [pause] Oh, that’s much better. . . . Now then, Dmitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb. [pause] The BOMB, Dmitri! The hydrogen bomb! Well now, what happened is, uh, one of our base commanders, he had a sort of, well, he went a little funny in the head. You know. Just a little . . . funny. And uh, he went and did a silly thing. Well, I’ll tell you what he did, he ordered his planes . . . to attack your country. Well, let me finish, Dmitri. Let me finish, Dmitri. Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri? . . . I’m just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It’s a friendly call. Of course it’s a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn’t friendly, you probably wouldn’t have even got it. They will not reach their targets for at least another hour. [pause] I’m sorry too, Dmitri. I’m very sorry. All right! You’re sorrier than I am! But I am sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are Dmitri. Don’t say that you are more sorry than I am, because I am capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we’re both sorry, all right? All right.

President Merkin Muffley, as played by Peter Sellers, speaking to the Soviet premier in Stanley Kubrick’s classic dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), written by Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter George.