I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to W. C. Jarvis, 1820.
The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.
Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1860), Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. I, Religion and Science.
But more was involved in the Russian Revolution of 1991 than a change of institutions, however basic; at the heart of the transformation was a change in the defining ethos of life: viz., the abandonment of the Idea of
Socialism. To understand the significance of this, Aristotle is really more helpful than all the social science of the behavioral age. In the Politics, the economy and the polity are viewed as part of ethics. In other words, ethics gives purpose, the final cause, or what would now be called, in functional terms, the value system of a society, that which lends meaning to each of its institutions, and indeed makes it possible for them to function at all. And this ethical purpose must be transcendent to any one of its particular manifestations. nbsp;. .. . . the [socialist] system can be held together, in its ascending phase, only so long as the socialist Myth is credible, that is, while its realization still lies in the future. Once socialism has been built, however, the Myth is transformed by the results it has produced into the Lie. . . . it was only a question of time before the internal contradictions of the impossible enterprise of ‘building socialism’ worked themselves out in the total discrediting, and hence the brusque abandonment, of the system.
In short, there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union has built it. When a disastrously noncompetitive performance at last made this paradox apparent, the whole institutionalized fantasy of ‘really existing socialism’ vanished into thin air.
Martin Malia, “From Under The Rubble, What?” Problems of Communism, January-April 1992.
For human nature is strange: the less we are inclined to self-sacrifice, the more we insist on it in others.
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.
All the good are friends of one another.
The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government.
Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict or suffer harm.
Epicurus, Principle Doctrine XXXII
Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (1913, 1967), p. 429.
We must be severe, not only with ourselves, but with others also; exigent, not only with ourselves, but with others also; and so, on the contrary, benevolent not only towards others, but also toward ourselves; compassionate, not only toward others, but also towards this instrument of labour that we carry about with us and of which we sometimes demand too much; that is, our empirical individuality. Reality is neither democratic nor aristocratic, but both together; it abhors the privilege of some over others as much as that equality, according to which each one must have the same value as the other at every moment.