Category: Thought

In all of my years, one thing does not change, 
However you disguise it, this thing does not change: 
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

TV-watchers have no doubt noted so often that they are no longer aware of how often the interchangeable TV hosts handle anyone who tries to explain why something happened. “Are you suggesting that there was a conspiracy?” A twinkle starts in a pair of bright contact lenses. No matter what the answer, there is a wriggling of the body, followed by a tiny snort and a significant glance into the camera to show that the guest has just been delivered to the studio by flying saucer. This is one way for the public never to understand what actual conspirators — whether in the F.B.I. or on the Supreme Court or toiling for Big Tobacco — are up to.

Price-regulation by State authority (through State purchase, like our Farm Board) was tried in China about 350 B.c. It did not work. It was tried again, with State distribution, in the first century A.D., and did not work. Private trading was suppressed in the second century B.C., and regional planning was tried a little later. They did not work; the costs were too high. In the eleventh century A.D., a plan like the R.F.C. was tried, but again cost too much. State monopolies are very old; there were two in China in the seventh century B.C. I suppose there is not a single item on the modern politician’s agenda that was not tried and found wanting ages ago

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.