Category: Thought

We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us. How can we move towards the new life, how create new activities without getting out of the past and without placing ourselves above it? And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it and it is in us? There is no other way out except through thought, which does not break off relations with the past but rises ideally above it and converts it into knowledge.

Benedetto Croce was an Italian philosopher and outspoken anti-fascist. He called his political philosophy “liberism.”

If you say ‘fascist’ it means ‘Hitler,’ although Hitler was probably more influenced by Stalin than by Mussolini — and ‘Hitler’ means ‘Auschwitz.’ So as soon as you disagree with the prevailing leftist culture or with either of our political parties and they want to call you a name, then you become a ‘fascist,’ which means you support the extermination of millions of people in a concentration camp.

Paul Gottfried, on the Tom Woods Show, April 28, 2016, a discussion of Gottfried’s book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept (2016).

If ‘economics tell us’ that our present army of workers, working half time, will be able, under Socialism, to earn twelve and a half times as much as at present — well, then, it is high time to demand proofs. My personal view is that no such proofs exist. The whole idea, in a word, is sheer nonsense. There is no more ground for it, in the actual facts of existence, than for the doctrine that, if I had brown eyes instead of blue, I would be a Methodist bishop at $8,000 a year.

H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).

I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

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

Looked at from an economic point of view, I hold socialism to be the active or direct distribution of products by the state. Regarded from its more general or political aspect, I designate as socialistic any extension of state interference or activity beyond the point up to which that interference is necessary in order that freedom may be at the maximum. Individualism postulates that some government — that is, some compulsory cooperation for political purposes — is needed in order to keep freedom at this point, that so much government is justifiable and good, and that all government beyond this is unjustifiable and mischievous. This quantum of government desiderated by the individualist constitutes a norm from which anarchism diverges on one side and socialism on the other. If we are suffering from a poison we find it advantageous to take a second poison, which acts as an antidote to the first. But, if we are wise, we limit our dose of the second poison so that the toxic effects of both combined are at the minimum. If we take more of it, it produces toxic effects of its own beyond those necessary to counteract, so far as possible, the first poison. If we take less of it, the first poison, to some extent, will do its bad work unchecked.

Joseph Hiam Levy, The Outcome of Individualism (1892), Chapter Two.

We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and we use it as if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into his hat.

William J. Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905).

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists — I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

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

I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to de land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in de old cabin quarter, wid de ole folks, and my brudders and sisters. But to dis solemn resolution I came; I was free, and dey should be free also; I would make a home for dem in de North, and de Lord helping me, I would bring dem all dere.

Harriet Tubman, as quoted in Sarah H. Bradford, The Moses of Her People (1886).

I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.

Harriet Tubman, as quoted in Mary Biggs, Women’s Words: The Columbia Book of Quotations by Women (1996), p. 2.

Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human. . . . No people will be truly free till all are free.

Benedetto Croce was an Italian philosopher and outspoken anti-fascist.