Category: Thought

Politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business.

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
But who will guard the guardians themselves?

Juvenal, Sixth Satire

The commitment to ‘social justice’ has in fact become the chief outlet for moral emotion, the distinguishing attribute of the good man, and the recognized sign of the possession of a moral conscience. Though people may occasionally be perplexed to say which of its conflicting claims advanced in its name are valid, scarcely anyone doubts that the expression has a definite meaning, describes a high ideal, and points to grave defects of the existing social order which urgently call for correction. Even though until recently one would have vainly sought in the extensive literature for an intelligible definition of the term, there still seems to exist little doubt, either among ordinary people or among the learned, that the expression has a definite and well understood sense.

But the near-universal acceptance of a belief does not prove that it is valid or even meaningful any more than the general belief in witches or ghosts proved the validity of these concepts.

Friedrich A. Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, being the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 66.

No man will get my help in robbery, and therefore no governor will take me on his staff.

Juvenal, Third Satire

[I]t is an ironic and remarkable feature of the American Left that there is no longer space for liberals within American liberalism.

Milo Yiannapoulis, preface to Vox Day, SJW’s Always Lie, 2015.

If an ideology produces unhappiness, misery, grief, division, sickness, boredom, and hatred, surely this is not a commendation but an indictment.

John Norman, GorChronicles.com

Man was created for social intercourse; but social intercourse cannot be maintained without a sense of justice; then man must have been created with a sense of justice.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816

[W]e did not invent the biotruths of human nature, no more than we invented vision, speech, the circulation of blood, the beating of the heart.

We did not invent men and women.

They are what they are, and what they are not is hollow vessels to be filled with whatever sugars and syrups their betters, the anointed cooks of humanity, the intolerant coveters of power and would-be imposers of values, see fit to pour into receptive, neutral containers to be labeled from the outside by strangers who do not know them, or themselves, and to be filled with whatever contents these outsiders might deem in their own best interests!

John Norman, GorChronicles.com

Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their powers: that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, & to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him: every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him: and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural right.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816

The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument hitherto unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity; but national education, since at least it presupposes the selection and appointment of some one instructor, must always promote a definite form of development, however careful to avoid such an error. And hence it is attended with all those disadvantages which we before observed to flow from such a positive policy; and it only remains to be added, that every restriction becomes more directly fatal, when it operates on the moral part of our nature,—that if there is one thing more than another which absolutely requires free activity on the part of the individual, it is precisely education, whose object it is to develop the individual.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action (1792), English edition The Sphere and Duties of Government, as translated by Joseph Coulthard (1854).