Category: Thought

Thank you for your email. This Internet of yours is a wonderful invention.

(George W. Bush to Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign.)

Hillary Clinton does share Richard Nixon’s penchant for secrecy and dissembling, an obsession with enemies, and an inability to change course until even more damage is done. The country paid a terrible price electing to its highest office a person with Nixon’s character flaws. If Democrats don’t understand that their self-interest lies in looking at other candidates before their 2016 convention, they face a strong chance that over a long campaign the public will come to agree that Hillary has too many Nixonian qualities to be trusted with high office.

John Fund, National Review, “Do Hillary and Nixon Look Like Soulmates?” (August 21, 2015).

“New thinking. Unleashing growth that creates opportunity. Promoting development that lifts all people out of poverty.Supporting democracy that gives citizens their say. Advancing the security and justice that delivers peace. Respecting the human rights of all people. These are the keys to progress — not just in Africa, but around the world.”

Remarks by President Obama to the People of Africa at Mandela Hall, African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (July 28, 2015).

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in The World Tomorrow (May 1928).

“Yes, in our world, old thinking can be a stubborn thing. That’s one of the reasons why we need term limits — old people think old ways.”

Remarks by President Obama to the People of Africa at Mandela Hall, African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (July 28, 2015).

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success.

Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).

Interference of any kind . . . in the spontaneous direction of industry, and the free employment by their owners of the great agents in production, labour, land, and capital, has the certain effect of benumbing their power and lessening the sum of production, and consequently the shares, of the producing parties; as well as of needlessly, and therefore unjustly, curtailing their freedom of action.

G. Poulett Scrope, M.P., Principles of Political Economy, Deduced from the Natural Laws of Social Welfare, and Applied to the Present State of Britain (1833), p. 231.

The entire logic of human existence can be formulated in five words — ‘produce in order to consume.’ Our reason and sense of justice revolt at the notion of a man who should perpetually consume without producing anything. Everybody understands that children should consume on credit: it is right that old persons should end by consuming what they have produced in their prime; it is perfectly proper that the worker should rest when tired, and consume a part of his surplus products. But he among us who should voluntarily live On another’s labour, and share useful things without adding to them, would be a true parasite.

Edmond About, Handbook of Social Economy; or, The Worker’s A B C, (New York: D. Appleton & Co., translated from the final French edition, 1873), p. 61.

How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can’t say and what we can show and what we can’t show — it’s enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Man Who Sold the Moon

As great and strong societies have arisen, as the sphere of warfare has diminished while the sphere of industry has enlarged, the need for absolute conformity has ceased to be felt, while the advantages of freedom and variety come to be ever more clearly apparent. At a late stage of civilization, the flexible or plastic society acquires even a military advantage over the society that is more rigid, as in the struggle between French and English civilization for primacy in the world. In our own country, the political birth of which dates from the triumph of England in that mighty struggle, the element of plasticity in man’s nature is more thoroughly heeded, more fully taken account of, than in any other community known to history; and herein lies the chief potency of our promise for the future.

John Fiske, The Meaning of Infancy, 1883.