Category: Thought

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

Denis Diderot, “Refutation of Helvétius” (written 1773-76, published 1875).

In judging of political good and evil, the average legislator thinks much after the manner of the mother with the spoiled child: if a course is productive of immediate benefit, that is considered sufficient justification.

Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (1873; 1891), pp. 102-103.

Dissatisfaction with his lot seems to be the characteristic of man in all ages and climates. So far, however, from being an evil, as at first might be supposed, it has been the great civiliser of our race; and has tended, more than any thing else, to raise us above the condition of the brutes.

Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852).

The present social state is transitional, as past social states have been transitional. There will, I hope and believe, come a future social state differing as much from the present as the present differs from the past with its mailed barons and defenseless serfs. In Social Statics, as well as in The Study of Sociology and in Political Institutions, is clearly shown the desire for an organisation more conducive to the happiness of men at large than that which exists. My opposition to socialism results from the belief that it would stop the progress to such a higher state and bring back a lower state. Nothing but the slow modification of human nature by the discipline of social life, can produce permanently advantageous changes.

Herbert Spencer, “From Freedom to Bondage,” in Thomas Mackay (ed.), A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation (1891). The three works cited are Social Statics; or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (1851), presented in 1892 in an Abridged and Revised form; The Study of Sociology (1873); and Political Institutions (1882), which appeared as Part V in the second volume of his Principles of Sociology.

It is not, then, chiefly in the interests of the employing classes that socialism is to be resisted, but much more in the interests of the employed classes.

Herbert Spencer, “From Freedom to Bondage,” in Thomas Mackay (ed.), A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation (1891).

A fundamental error pervading the thinking of nearly all parties, political and social, is that evils admit of immediate and radical remedies. ‘If you will but do this, the mischief will be prevented.’ ‘Adopt my plan and the suffering will disappear.’ ‘The corruption will unquestionably be cured by enforcing this measure.’ Everywhere one meets with beliefs, expressed or implied, of these kinds. They are all ill-founded. It is possible to remove causes which intensify the evils; it is possible to change the evils from one form into another; and it is possible, and very common, to exacerbate the evils by the efforts made to prevent them; but anything like immediate cure is impossible.

Herbert Spencer, “From Freedom to Bondage,” in Thomas Mackay (ed.), A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation (1891).

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralysed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labour a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man. A sorry heritage to begin a new life of freedom and brotherhood.

Anarchist Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), after she had traveled to the new Soviet Union and then returned.

Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!

. . . What is it, then, that is called a “fixed idea”? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. . . .

Touch the fixed idea of such a fool, and you will at once have to guard your back against the lunatic’s stealthy malice. For these great lunatics are like the little so-called lunatics in this point too — that they assail by stealth him who touches their fixed idea. They first steal his weapon, steal free speech from him, and then they fall upon him with their nails. Every day now lays bare the cowardice and vindictiveness of these maniacs, and the stupid populace hurrahs for their crazy measures. One must read the journals of this period, and must hear the Philistines talk, to get the horrible conviction that one is shut up in a house with fools.

Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (1844; translated by Steven T. Byington, 1907).