It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943).
Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1836 entry, The American Notebooks (1835, 1853).
And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive,” or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity.” In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943).
Private property and free trade stand on exactly the same footing, both being essential and indivisible parts of liberty, both depending upon rights, which no body of men, whether called governments or anything else, can justly take from the individual.
Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885).
You really don’t understand. We don’t worry about individuals. What counts is that many millions of people have the knowledge that they can go to a weapon shop if they want to protect themselves and their families. And, even more important, the forces that would normally try to& enslave them are restrained by the conviction that it is dangerous to press people too far. And so a great balance has been struck between those who govern and those who are governed.
Lucy Rail, a character in A. E. Van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951).
Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Wakefield” (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851).
Of all the miserable, unprofitable, inglorious wars in the world [the worst] is the war against words. Let men say just what they like. Let them propose to cut every throat and burn every house — if they so like it. We have nothing to do with a man’s words or a man’s thoughts, except to put against them better words and better thoughts, and so to win in the great moral and intellectual duel that is always going on, and on which all progress depends.
Auberon Herbert, Westminster Gazette (1893), as quoted in Theodore Schroeder, Free Speech for Radicals: Seven Essays (1912), p. 43.
Many things complicated by nature are restored by reason.
Titus Livius (c. 59 BC – 17 AD), History of Rome, Book XXVI, sec. 11.
The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts.
Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow (1895).
The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.
Titus Livius (c. 59 BC – 17 AD), Ab urbe condita (History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, 1960), Introduction.