People now have more information, and they are smarter, overall, as a consequence — even in those ways they choose to be dumb.
Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998), p. 226.
Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property; no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and co-equal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.
Lysander Spooner, “Vices Are Not Crimes,” anonymously in Prohibition a Failure: Or, the True Solution of the Temperance Question (1875), by Dio Lewis.
Sow a thought, and you reap an act; Sow an act, and you reap a habit; Sow a habit, and you reap a character; Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
Reform will only be established in the long term to the degree that it passes into the ideas and habits of the majority.
Cowper’s Mahometans ate up the hog while denouncing it as an unclean thing, by judging each piece — as the phrase of the empirical Socialist goes — ‘on its merits.’ So you are being made to swallow Socialism bit by bit.
It is impossible for a government to levy taxes and distribute large amounts of money without by that very process creating large numbers of enemies of its authority and those jealous of its power.
I have heard a socialist ask, “Will collectivism change the soil and the sunshine of Medoc?” No, but wine does not come into existence of its own accord, the vine-stocks and the conditions of soil and of climate do not produce fine harvests spontaneously, but need to be properly utilised, and require an annual expenditure upon the cost of cultivation; and subordinate officials without a direct interest are not the men to apply the required attention to this kind of production.
Yves Guyot, Socialistic Fallacies (1910), Book VII, “Collectivist Organization.”
Every scientific “fulfillment” raises new “questions” and cries out to be surpassed and rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this.
Max Weber, from a speech (1918) presented at Munich University, published in 1919, and collected in ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf,’ Gessammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (1922), 524–525, as translated by Rodney Livingstone in David Owen (ed.), The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation: Politics as a Vocation (2004), 11.
A trusty companion halves the journey and doubles the courage.
Edward Bulwer Lytton
The entire able-bodied population are preparing to massacre one another; though no one, it is true, wants to attack, and everybody protests his love of peace and determination to maintain it, yet the whole world feels that it only requires some unforeseen incident, some unpreventable accident, for the spark to fall in a flash . . . and blow all Europe sky-high.
Frédéric Passy, February 4, 1895