Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
John Milton, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (1644).
Without intelligence there is not rational life: and things are only good, in so far as they aid man in his enjoyment of the intellectual life, which is defined by intelligence. Contrariwise, whatsoever things hinder man’s perfecting of his reason, and capability to enjoy the rational life, are alone called evil.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677), Part IV, Appendix V.
Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
John Milton, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (1644).
All philosophies have the common property of being speculative, and, therefore, their immediate influence on those who hold them is in many ways alike, however opposed the theories may be to one another: they all make people theoretical. In this sense any philosophy, if warmly embraced, has a moralising force, because, even if it belittles morality, it absorbs the mind in intellectual contemplation, accustoms it to wide and reasoned comparisons, and makes the sorry escapades of human nature from convention seem even more ignominious than its ruling prejudices.
George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy (1916), Chapter XVI, “Egotism in Practice.”
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943).
Of all the vices incident to man, lying is the most mean, most contemptible; it evinces a very weak, depraved heart, which shrinks at the exposure of motives and of actions.
Josiah Bartlett, chief executive, president, and governor of the State of New Hampshire, and before that delegate to the Continental Congress — not to be confused with the fictional U. S. President played by Martin Sheen on The West Wing.
There is worldwide pigheadedness about money. There is a willful and even belligerent ignorance concerning ways and means. . . . Not all this ignorance is irrational. Economists, for instance. John Maynard Keynes couldn’t have become a big shot, guiding government intervention in business and finance, if it hadn’t been for the Great Depression. And Alan Greenspan is a success because we all lost our wallets when inflation scared our pants off.
P. J. O’Rourke, Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (1998), p. 235.
A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
Roy Blount, Jr., “Reading and Nothingness, Of Proust in the Summer Sun,” New York Times (June 2, 1985).
Egotism is a bastard word meant to designate something spurious and artificial, not to be confused with the natural egoism or self-assertion proper to every living creature. To condemn the latter would be to condemn life, which could not go on without it; but like every normal faculty, self-assertion has degrees, and passes insensibly from the happy mean to the opposite vices of excess and defect. Egotism, on the contrary, though more or less pronounced, is always a vice because it is founded on a mistake.
George Santayana, postscript to Egotism in German Philosophy (1916).
Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
P. J. O’Rourke, as quoted in Busted : Stone Cowboys, Narco-lords, and Washington’s War on Drugs (2002), edited by Mike Gray.