Category: Thought

Individual liberty . . . is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable. But to ask the peoples of our day to sacrifice, like those of the past, the whole of their individual liberty to political liberty, is the surest means of detaching them from the former and, once this result has been achieved, it would be only too easy to deprive them of the latter.

Benjamin Constant, On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns (“De la Liberté des Anciens Comparée à celle des Modernes,”1819)

“Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), chapter one, p. 14.

Where there are no rights, there are no duties.

It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

A nation is poor or is rich according as the quantity of property which she annually creates, in proportion to the number of her people, is great or is small. Now commerce tends to increase this annual produce by occasioning a more productive application and distribution both of the land and of the labour of the country.

The love of domination never attains more than a factitious elevation, that is sure to make enemies of all its neighbours.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.

The command of a large sum is a dangerous temptation to a national administration. Though accumulated at their expense, the people rarely, if ever profit by it: yet in point of fact, all value, and consequently, all wealth, originates with the people.

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior “righteous indignation” — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Attributed to Aldous Huxley by John H. George in Be Reasonable (1994), but definitely misattributed to Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow (1922). See actual source.

[T]he misguided people are rushing into a horrible and absurd struggle, in which victory would be more fatal than defeat; since, according to this supposition, the result would be the realisation of universal evils, the destruction of every means of emancipation, the consummation of its own misery.

Frédéric Bastiat, “Capital and Interest” in Essays on Political Economy (New York:
G. P. Putnams & Sons, 1874). Bastiat is referring to the anti-capitalist ideas of “MM. Proudhon and Thoré” who, he argued, were “deceiving themselves” as well as the people.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon was the first person on record to call himself an “anarchist” and regard it as a good thing, and the first to call the owner of property a “capitalist.” He is known for a number of works promoting “mutualism,” including Systems of Economical Contradictions, or; The Philosophy of Misery, which was translated into English by Benjamin R. Tucker. Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré (better known as Théophile Thoré-Bürger) was a journalist and art critic now known mostly as the re-discroverer of the paintings of Vermeer. Among his writings was La Recherche de la liberté of 1845.