Category: Thought

Rational satisfaction is no dream of an undisturbed and impossibly complete felicity. It is not inconsistent with pain and sorrow, and the exclusion of many human delights. To have the least chance of success it must be weighted with a sober sense of reality, and an acceptance of the actual conditions of human living; to demand more than life can possibly give is to cut off our chance of satisfaction at the outset. We must be ready, if we are not to be always open to the inroads of discontent, to see and acquiesce in inevitable limitations, to make the best of necessarily imperfect attainment, to give up without repining what does not lend itself to our more dominant and insistent interests, to prefer defeat to success that degrades us in our own eyes.

Arthur Kenyon Rogers, The Theory of Ethics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922).

A people are therefore never so disposed to increase the functions of central government as at the close of a long and bloody revolution, which, after having wrested property from the hands of its former possessors, has shaken all belief, and filled the nation with fierce hatreds, conflicting interests, and contending factions. The love of public tranquility becomes at such times an indiscriminate passion, and the members of the community are apt to conceive a most inordinate devotion to order.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2 (1840).

“The truth is, all might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought.”

Samuel Adams, writing as “Candidus,” in The Boston Gazette (October 14, 1771).

“That judges of important causes should hold office for life is a disputable thing, for the mind grows old as well as the body.”

Aristotle, Politics, Book Two.

These associations, or political parties, are actual armies which have been trained to pursue power; their immediate objective is to so increase the number of their adherents as to control an electoral majority. Influential electors are for this purpose promised such or such share in the profits which will follow success, but such promises — generally place or privilege — are redeemable only by a multiplication of ‘places,’ which involves a corresponding increase of national enterprises, whether of war or of peace. It is nothing to a politician that the result is increased charges and heavier drains on the vital energy of the people. The unceasing competition under which they labour, first in their efforts to secure office, and next to maintain their position, compels them to make party interest their sole care, and they are in no position to consider whether this personal and immediate interest is in harmony with the general and permanent good of the nation.

Gustave de Molinari, The Society of To-morrow (1904).

[T]he hope of evading such taxes by smuggling gives frequent occasion to forfeitures and other penalties, which entirely ruin the smuggler, a person who, though no doubt highly blameable for violating the laws of his country, is frequently incapable of violating those of natural justice, and would have been, in every respect, an excellent citizen, had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so.

Adam Smith, The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), referring to luxury taxes.

To promote the little interest of one little order of men in one country, it hurts the interest of all other orders of men in that country, and of all men in all other countries.

Adam Smith, The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), on colonialism, his own country’s participation in which Smith judged quite negatively: “Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.”

The truest mark of having been born with great qualities is to have been born without envy.

La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, (1665, 1678), 433rd maxim.

To hurt in any degree the interest of any one order of citizens, for no other purpose but to promote that of some other, is evidently contrary to that justice and equality of treatment which the sovereign owes to all the different orders of his subjects.

Adam Smith, The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)