When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.
Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 32.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
Aldous Huxley, “Distractions I” (essay) in Vedanta for the Western World (1945), Christopher Isherwood, editor.
“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.”
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
The popular paraphrase of the maxim, above, from The Analects of Master Kong (Kong Fu Zi, or “Confucius”), Chapter XIII, with one grammatical emendation. (The common saying has, inexplicably, the final word in singular form.)
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.
Mary, in Pride and Prejudice (1813), Ch. 5.
The basis of a democratic state is liberty.
Aristotle, Politics, Book VI.
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (1961).
The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), chapter one, p. 12.
Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885).
To live in a state of liberty is not to live apart from law. It is, on the contrary, to live under the highest law, the only law that can really profit a man, the law which is consciously and deliberately imposed by himself on himself.
Reason is not measured by size or height, but by principle.
Epictetus, Discourses, Book I, ch. 12.
However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), chapter three, p. 24.