Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Autobiographical Notes,” The New Yorker (September 11, 1970)
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News (23 October 1909)
I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Autobiographical Notes,” The New Yorker (September 11, 1970)
Socialism is but the further screwing up of the State machine to limit the individual.
James Huneker, in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1913), p. 364.
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” published in Essays on Freedom and Power (1972)
It would be easy to point out a paragraph in St. Augustine, or a sentence of Grotius that outweighs in influence the acts of fifty parliaments, and our cause owes more to Cicero and Seneca, to Vinet and Tocqueville, than to the laws of Lycurgus or the five codes of France.
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)
The great question is to discover, not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the conscience of mankind.
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” published in Essays on Freedom and Power (1972)
Herbert Spencer, “The Great Political Superstition,” The Man versus The State (1884).
If we adopt pessimism as a creed, and with it accept the implication that life in general being an evil should be put an end to, then there is no ethical warrant for these actions by which life is maintained: the whole question drops. But if we adopt either the optimist view or the meliorist view — if we say that life on the whole yields more pleasure than pain; or that it is on the way to become such that it will yield more pleasure than pain; then these actions by which life is maintained are justified, and there results a warrant for the freedom to perform them. Those who hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that men ought not to be prevented from carrying on life-sustaining activities. In other words, if it is said to be ‘right’ that they should carry them on, then, by permutation, we get the assertion that they ‘have a right’ to carry them on. Clearly the conception of ‘natural rights’ originates in recognition of the truth that if life is justifiable, there must be a justification for the performance of acts essential to its preservation; and, therefore, a justification for those liberties and claims which make such acts possible.