Category: Thought

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Oscar Wilde, “The Children of the Poets,” The Pall Mall Gazette (October 14, 1886).

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.

Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review, February 1891.

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.

Václav Havel, Speech of October 1989, accepting a peace prize.

I am strongly and steadily opposed to all plans of state employment. Besides the old fatal objection that we have no right to compel some to pay for others, such works interfere with the regular labor market, they are badly supervised and badly conducted and therefore tend to demoralize the men employed; they often keep labor collected at certain spots when it should be dispersed, discouraging the men from following and finding other work.

Auberon Herbert, from the appendix to the 1885 edition of The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State.

I believe that freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience.

Men quickly learn to look upon what is done for them by the state as a right and grumble that what is given is not given in fuller measure. It is a common cry: “We do not want charity, but state employment.” State employment is charity, only with all the healing grace left out of it.

Auberon Herbert, as reprinted in the first edition of The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885.

Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation. That is what we have not taught young people, or older ones for that matter. You do not finally win a state of freedom that is protected forever. It doesn’t work that way.

We must all begin to question the experts. They have not really been right. No abundance of material goods can compensate for the death of individuality and personal creativity.

Correta Scott King, Harvard class day address (1968); published in the July 1, 1968, issue of Harvard Alumni Bulletin.

The day will come, as we shake our minds free from the old and stupid ideas about coercing each other, that we shall mock as much at the idea of state education as we are now learning to mock at the idea of state religion — when even a municipal organization of education will seem to us as absurd and grotesque an undertaking as a municipal organization of religion.

Auberon Herbert, letter to the editor, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, as reprinted in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885.

We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.