Category: Thought

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven’t seen them since.

Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and Fiction (1978)

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (April 4, 1819).

The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation.

Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays, “Salvation by Force.”

The Thirteen States are Thirteen Sovereign bodies.

Socialism is essentially inimical to family life, which it regards as a bourgeois institution — to use its own favorite anathema. Socialism would make motherhood a State business or profession, would pay women for this sexual function, and deprive fathers of all status or recognition.

Joseph Hiam Levy, The Outcome of Individualism (Third Edition, 1892)

The ordinary affairs of a nation offer little difficulty to a person of any experience.

Prosperity or egalitarianism — you have to choose. I favor freedom — you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.

Anything whatever can be made ridiculous; to see this side of it, and nothing more, is to become the mere jester, whose claim to be regarded as the ideal moralist is cer tainly very slight. But between a too solemn sense of high importance, and that conviction of the intrinsic smallness of everything in particular which some of our satirists have displayed, there is a middle ground.

Arthur Kenyon Rogers, The Theory of Ethics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922).