Category: Thought

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

Dorothy L. Sayers, “Are Women Human?” (1938)

Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects.

Jack McDevitt, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 5.

Most government and corporate leaders would have trouble getting people to follow them out of a burning building. One way you can tell the worst of them is that they talk about leadership a lot. I doubt Winston Churchill ever used the word. Or, for that matter, Attila the Hun.

Jack McDevitt, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 5.

Society . . . as it becomes more enlightened, should be very careful not to establish bodies of men who must necessarily be made foolish or vicious by the very constitution of their profession.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter one.

[E]very individual spontaneously tries to find the place and the trade in which he can best increase National gain, if laws do not prevent him from doing so.

Anders Chydenius, The National Gain (1765), §5.

Yes, it was not journalism’s finest hour. But, MacAllister often argued, it never had been.

Jack McDevitt, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 24.

Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter one.

To violate its own laws is a special privilege of absolute monarchy.

Edmond About, The Roman Question (1859), H. C. Coape, translator.

The more opportunities there are in a Society for some persons to live upon the toil of others, and the less those others may enjoy the fruits of their work themselves, the more is diligence killed, the former become insolent, the latter despairing, and both negligent.

Anders Chydenius, The National Gain (1765), §20.

“I grant you . . . that the Pope ought to be independent. But could he not be so at a somewhat less cost? Is it absolutely necessary that 3,124,668 men should sacrifice their liberty, their security, and all that is most precious to them, in order to secure the independence which makes us so happy and so proud? The Apostles were certainly independent at a cheaper rate, for they did nobody harm.

Edmond About, The Roman Question (1859), H. C. Coape, translator.