Category: Thought

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915) Ch. 23

Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922), Part V.

Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State.

Randolph Bourne, “The State” (1918)

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

W. Somerset Maugham, Strictly Personal, Chapter 31 (1941)

I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep.

As long as I don’t write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.

Once the truth is denied to human beings, it is pure illusion to try to set them free. Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.

Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Fides et Ratio (September 14, 1998).