Category: Thought

What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.

The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.

“Only one thing can save this country, and that’s to get a handle on this deficit and debt issue.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell, as quoted in Jack Brammer, “Sen. Mitch McConnell says Medicare, Social Security must change to fix U.S. debt,” Wichita Eagle (Jan. 21, 2013).

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960).

The mere gathering of individuals into a group does not constitute them a society. A society, in the sociological sense, is formed only when, besides juxtaposition there is cooperation. So long as members of the group do not combine their energies to achieve some common end or ends, there is little to keep them together. They are prevented from separating only when the wants of each are better satisfied by uniting his efforts with those of others, than they would be if he acted alone.

Cooperation, then, is at once that which can not exist without a society, and that for which a society exists.

A stronger affection to be displayed by child for parent in later life, must be established by a closer intimacy between parent and child in early life. . . . When the minds of children are no longer stunted and deformed by the mechanical lessons of stupid teachers — when instruction, instead of giving mutual pain gives mutual pleasure, by ministering in proper order to faculties which are eager to appropriate fit conceptions presented in fit forms — when among adults wide-spread knowledge is joined with rational ideas of teaching, at the same time that in the young there is an easy unfolding of the mind such as is even now shown by exceptional facility of acquisition — when the earlier stages of education passed through in the domestic circle have come to yield, as they will in ways scarcely dreamed of at present, daily occasions for the strengthening of sympathy, intellectual and moral, then will the latter days of life be smoothed by a greater filial care, reciprocating the greater parental care bestowed in earlier life.

What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.

We have seen that the militant type of social structure is based on the principle of compulsory co-operation, while the industrial type of social structure is based on the principle of voluntary co-operation. Now it is clear that plurality of wives, whether the wives are captured in war or purchased from their fathers regardless of their own wills, implies domestic rule of the compulsory type: the husband is tyrant and the wives are slaves. Conversely, the establishment of monogamy where fewer women are taken in war and fewer men lost in war, is accompanied by increased value of the individual woman; who, even when purchased, is therefore likely to be better treated. And when, with further advance, some power of choice is acquired by the woman, there is an approach to the voluntary co-operation which characterizes this marital relation in its highest form. The domestic despotism which polygyny involves, is congruous with the political despotism proper to predominant militancy; and the diminishing political coercion which naturally follows development of the industrial type, is congruous with the diminishing domestic coercion which naturally follows the accompanying development of monogamy.

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, Part III: Domestic Institutions, Chapter IX: “The Family” (1898).

A fundamental error pervading the thinking of nearly all parties, political and social, is that evils admit of immediate and radical remedies. ‘If you will but do this, the mischief will be prevented.’ ‘Adopt my plan and the suffering will disappear.’ ‘The corruption will unquestionably be cured by enforcing this measure.’ Everywhere one meets with beliefs, expressed or implied, of these kinds. They are all ill-founded. It is possible to remove causes which intensify the evils; it is possible to change the evils from one form into another; and it is possible, and very common, to exacerbate the evils by the efforts made to prevent them; but anything like immediate cure is impossible.

Herbert Spencer, “From Freedom to Bondage,” Introduction to Thomas Mackay, ed., A Plea for Liberty (1891).

Some gain there must be, so this I decree: each time you gain your heart’s desire, your heart will reach for something higher.