Category: Thought

In modern days, in civilised days, men’s choice determines nearly all they do. But in early times that choice determined scarcely anything.

Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872), p. 29.

“Much as the old world believed in pure blood, it had very little of it. Most historic nations conquered prehistoric nations, and though they massacred many, they did not massacre all. They enslaved the subject men, and they married the subject women. No doubt the whole bond of early society was the bond of descent; no doubt it was essential to the notions of a new nation that it should have had common ancestors; the modern idea that vicinity of habitation is the natural cement of civil union would have been repelled as an impiety if it could have been conceived as an idea.”

Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).

“Ideas are forces: the existence of one determines our reception of others.”

G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (Third Series) Problem the First — The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope, and Method, 1879.

“Commerce has brought nations closer, it has given them customs and habits that are almost identical; the heads of states may be enemies: the peoples are compatriots.”

Benjamin Comstant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns (1819).

“What is the Source out of which Taxes are actually paid? The answer is, out of the gains of Exchanges of some sort. Gifts aside, and thefts which are out of the question, no man ever did, no man ever can, pay his taxes, except out of the gains of some sales which he has already made.”

Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy (1891).

“The danger of ancient liberty was that men, exclusively concerned with securing their share of social power, might attach too little value to individual rights and enjoyments.

“The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily.”

Benjamin Comstant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns (1819).

Common sense is outraged by a law which requires a man to part with his property at less than the actual value . . .

Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy (1891).

“An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.”

Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830).

“Calumniate, calumniate; there will always be something which sticks.”

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Le Barbier de Séville (1773).

“The inner spiritual chaos of the times, so powerfully created by the dynamics of capitalism itself, is such as to make nihilism an easy temptation. A ‘free society’ in Hayek’s sense gives birth in massive numbers to ‘free spirits’ — emptied of moral substance but still driven by primordial moral aspirations. Such people are capable of the most irrational actions. Indeed, it is my impression that, under the strain of modern life, whole classes of our population — and the educated classes most of all — are entering what can only be called, in the strictly clinical sense, a phase of infantile regression. With every passing year, public discourse becomes sillier and more petulant, emotions become, apparently, more ungovernable. Some of our most intelligent university professors are now loudly saying things that, had they been uttered by one of their students twenty years ago, would have called forth gentle and urbane reproof.”

Irving Kristol, “‘When virtue loses all her loveliness’ — some reflections on Capitalism and ‘the free society,’” National Affairs, No. 21, Fall 1970.