Category: Thought

Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.

Stendhal, journal entry (December 10, 1801)

In order that liberty should have a firm foundation, an acquaintance with the world would naturally lead cool men to conclude that it must be laid, knowing the weakness of the human heart, and the ‘deceitfulness of riches,’ either by poor men, or philosophers, if a sufficient number of men, disinterested from principle, or truly wise, could be wise.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindicaton of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

[W]ith respect to economy . . . [u]nder this relation society consists only in a continual succession of E X C H A N G E S, and exchange is a transaction of such a nature that both contracting parties both gain by it. . . .

We cannot cast our eyes on a civilized country without seeing with astongishment how much this continual succession of small advantages, unperceived but incessantly repeated, adds to the primitive power of man.

It is because this succession of changes, which constitutes society, has three remarkable properties. It produces concurrence of force, increase and preservation of intelligence and division of labour.

The utility of these three effects is continually augmenting.

M. Destutt Tracy, Traité de la volonté, English translation titled A Treatise on Political Economy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan; W. A. Rind & Co. Printers, 1817), pp. xvi-xvii.

[T]he horrors of neologism, which startle the purist, have given no alarm to the translator; where brevity, perspicuity, and even euphonium can be promoted by the introduction of a new word, it is an improvement of language. It is thus the English language has been brought to what it is; one half of it having been innovations, made at different times, from the Greek, Latin, French, and other languages — and is it the worse for these? Had the preposterous idea of fixing the language been adopted in the time of our Saxon ancestors, Pierce, Plowman, of Chaucer, of Spencer, the progress of ideas must have stopped with that of the progress of the language. On the contrary, nothing is more evident than that, as we advance in the knowledge of new things, and of new combinations of old ones, we must have new words to express them.

From the Prospectus to the English language translation of
Destutt de Tracy’s A Treatise on Political Economy, authored presumably by former President Thomas Jefferson (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan; W. A. Rind & Co. Printers 1817).

The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. . . . Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses any thing in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Herbert Spencer, “What Knowledge is of Most Worth,” The Westminster Review (July 1859) volume CXL

Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation.

Herbert Spencer, “The Evanescence of Evil,” Part 1, Chapter 2 of Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed, (London: John Chapman, 1851).

I renounce the idea sometimes advanced that the state governments ever were or continue to be, sovereign or unlimited. If the people are sovereign, their governments cannot also be sovereign.

John Taylor of Caroline, as quoted in Walter E. Volkomer, ed., The Liberal Tradition in American Thought (G. P. Putnam Sons, 1969)

I don’t need to be hit over the head with the unsubtle political musings of a bunch of 105 IQ actors.

Ben Shapiro, The Ben Shapiro Show, dailywire.com, January 9, 2017

Teach the child to respect that which is not respectable and you teach the child the first requirement of slavery: submission to unjust authority.

Gerry Spence, Give Me Liberty! Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century, 1998