[T]here exists in man what may be termed an instinct of personal rights — a feeling that leads him to claim as great a share of natural privilege as is claimed by others — a feeling that leads him to repel anything like an encroachment upon what he thinks his sphere of original freedom.
Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), chapter eleven
George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859).
Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, p. 34.
The English language was created by poets, a five-hundred year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest dialogue in world literature. French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.
C.S. Peirce, “Pragmatism and Pragmaticism” (1903).
In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don’t remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
Aristotle as quoted in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius.
I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.
Looked at from an economic point of view, I hold socialism to be the active or direct distribution of products by the state. Regarded from its more general or political aspect, I designate as socialistic any extension of state interference or activity beyond the point up to which that interference is necessary in order that freedom may be at the maximum. Individualism postulates that some government — that is, some compulsory cooperation for political purposes — is needed in order to keep freedom at this point, that so much government is justifiable and good, and that all government beyond this is unjustifiable and mischievous. This quantum of government desiderated by the individualist constitutes a norm from which anarchism diverges on one side and socialism on the other. If we are suffering from a poison we find it advantageous to take a second poison, which acts as an antidote to the first. But, if we are wise, we limit our dose of the second poison so that the toxic effects of both combined are at the minimum. If we take more of it, it produces toxic effects of its own beyond those necessary to counteract, so far as possible, the first poison. If we take less of it, the first poison, to some extent, will do its bad work unchecked.
Joseph Hiam Levy, The Outcome of Individualism (1892), Chapter Two.
George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920).
American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
Facts we would always place before our readers, whether they are palatable or not, and it is by placing them constantly before the public in their nakedness that the misunderstanding between the two communities in South Africa can be removed.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Indian Opinion, October 1, 1903.
Once we roared like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.