[I]f we are to make sense of American history, the Constitution, and the options before us as we confront Jefferson’s nightmare — namely, a government that acknowledges no fixed limits to its power — we have an obligation to understand it.
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century (Regnery, 2010), p. 113.
A community of interests and needs is the foundation of human friendship, while the opposition of needs and interests is not only capable of provoking antipathy, but it is notorious that nothing on earth has the same power of moving a man to violent and implacable hatred as a member of his own species.
Gustave de Molinari, The Society of To-morrow: A Forecast of Its Political and Economic Organisation (1899-1904), I.1.1.
Ernest Bramah, as quoted by Lin Carter, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, introduction (Ballantine Books, 1974).
Two resolute men, acting in concord, may transform an Empire, but an ordinary resourceful duck can escape from a dissentient rabble.
’Tis vain to look for birds in last year’s nests.
Don Quixote in Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote (1605).
The science of mine and thine — the science of justice — is the science of all human rights; of all a man’s rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Lysander Spooner, Natural Law; or, The Science of Justice, Section I, page 5 (1882).
However deep you dig a well it affords no refuge in the time of flood.
Ernest Bramah, “The Story of Tong So, the Averter of Calamities,” Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928)
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 astonishment 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.
Destutt de 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).