Category: Thought

The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it — when unpopular.

Mark Twain, “The United States of Lyncherdom” (1901), first printed in Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Europe and Elsewhere (1914).

Nature has provided, by means as simple as they are infallible, that there should be dispersion, diffusion, coordination, simultaneous progress, all constituting a state of things that your restrictive laws paralyze as much as they can; for the tendency of such laws is, by isolating communities, to render the diversity of condition much more marked, to prevent equalization, hinder integration, neutralize countervailing circumstances, and segregate nations, whether in their superiority or in their inferiority of condition.

Frédéric Bastiat, from Economic Sophisms, “To Equalize the Conditions of Production” — the “such laws” mentioned are protectionist measures, and protectionism was the chief target of Bastiat’s famous book.

Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.

Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Part Two: “Metaphysics of Virtue.”

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946; 1959; 1984).

Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

George Orwell, letter to Malcolm Muggeridge, December 4, 1948.