Category: Thought

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the People’s Stick.’

Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1873).

The liberty of every individual is only the reflection of his own humanity, or his human right through the conscience of all free men, his brothers and his equals.
I can feel free only in the presence of and in relationship with other men. In the presence of an inferior species of animal I am neither free nor a man, because this animal is incapable of conceiving and consequently recognizing my humanity. I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen.
 Only in respecting their human character do I respect my own.

My public and I understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.

Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that the enemy too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, no. 46 (October 9, 1917).

In arguing against free enterprise capitalism, the collectivist always adopts the false assumption of a fixed number of jobs in that system. Conversely, in arguing for collectivism, he always assumes that there will be as many jobs as there are workers. The government will make the jobs.

Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.

Even in the darkest and crassest times liberty trembles in the lines of poets and affirms itself in the pages of thinkers and burns, solitary and magnificent, in some men who cannot be assimilated by the world around them.

Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, 1938 (1941, Eng. translation).

Experience, the name men give to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde, Vera, or The Nihilists, 1880.

Like many other things, the laudable ideal of combining education and research has its seamy side, in that graduate teaching offers an opportunity to recruit cheap (and in a way forced) labour for the captains of the research industry.

Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972), p. 187.

And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Oscar Wilde, “The Philosophy of Dress,” The New York Tribune, 1885.

The pioneers of rationalism inveighed against the traditional dogmas, ridiculed popular superstitions, campaigned against priests and sorcerers, and castigated them for fostering and preying upon the ignorance of the masses — hoping that a final victory of science would vanish for ever the evils of unreason and organized deception. Little did they suspect that a Trojan Horse would appear in the camp of enlightenment, full of streamlined sorcerers clad in the latest paraphernalia of science.

Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972), p. 237-238.