Category: Thought

Ethics requires the kind of personal reflection, in the end, that no one else can do decisively for any individual.

Tibor R. Machan, The Promise of Liberty: A Non-Utopian Vision (2009), p. 69.

A fascist is a student who, seeing the representatives of a chemical industry recruiting on campus, cries, ‘Let’s chase the bastard off! We have the right to free speech but he doesn’t!’

John Hospers, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow (1971), p. 39.

Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature — this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.

Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, The Conditions of Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (1851), Pt. II, Ch. 17: The Rights of Children.

If one behaved as a good citizen or a charitable person simply because one was dreadfully scared of the state placing one in jail, one would not be a good citizen or person but barely more than a circus animal.

Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being (1998), p. 11.

Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 2 : The State of Nature; Protective Associations, p. 14.

εὖ γὰρ ἴστε, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, ὅτι οὐχ αἱ παλαῖστραι
οὐδὲ τὰ διδασκαλεῖα οὐδ᾿ ἡ μουσικὴ μόνον παιδεύει
τοὺς νέους, ἀλλὰ πολὺ μᾶλλον τὰ δημόσια κηρύγματα.

For you are well aware that it is not only by bodily exercises, by educational institutions, or by lessons in music, that our youth are trained, but much more effectually by public examples.

Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon (330 BC), III.246.

Öküz saraya çıkınca kral olmaz. Ama saray ahır olur.

When an ox enters a palace, it doesn’t become a king but the palace turns into a barn.

Circassian proverb, traditional.

Voyager upon life’s sea:—
To yourself be true,
And whate’er your lot may be,
Paddle your own canoe.

Dr. Edward P. Philpots, Paddle your own Canoe; written for Harry Clifton; appeared in Harper’s Monthly, May 1854.

When laws, customs, or institutions cease to be beneficial to man, they cease to be obligatory.

Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts (1858), p. 34.

The legislature, like the executive, has ceased to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. . . . If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of chiropractic, astrology or cannibalism.

H. L. Mencken,  (1880-1956) American writer and journalist, “The Library,” The American Mercury (May 1930), a book review of The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes (1930).