Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer.
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Dead Men’s Dialogue” in Dreamtigers (1960)
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.
[A]gainst the cant of the bigot or the hypocrite, no reasoning can aught avail. If you would argue until the end of life, the infallible creature must alone be right.
I mean not to boast; I would not excite envy, but manly emulation. We have all one common cause; let it, therefore, be our only contest, who shall most contribute to the security of the liberties of America.
Life is fired at us point blank.
Under Socialism the efficient man would have a price upon his head.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).
Truth is the enfant terrible of the Virtues.
William J. Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905), p. 50.