Category: Thought

“Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lower passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), chapter four, p. 33.

“We’re going to look back at this moment, 2015, as like the fever pitch of insanity — before somebody stands up, someone with maybe more credibility than Donald Trump, and says ‘whoa, whoa, whoa: not all 320 million of you can be victims at the same time.’”

Tucker Carlson, The Greg Gutfeld Show (FNC), July 26, 2015.

“A good parson once said, that where mystery begins, religion ends. Cannot I say, as truly at least, of human laws, that where mystery begins, justice ends?”

Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756).”

“A brave people will certainly prefer liberty, accompanied with a virtuous poverty, to a depraved and wealthy servitude.”

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

“However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), chapter three, p. 24.

“The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.”

Edmund Burke, speech in Buckinghamshire, England, 1784.

“Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), chapter one, p. 14.

“The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), chapter one, p. 12.

“The merit of this work will, I hope, place it in the hands of every reader in our country. By diffusing sound principles of Political Economy, it will protect the public industry from the parasite institutions now consuming it, and lead us to that just and regular distribution of the public burthens from which we have sometimes strayed.”

Thomas Jefferson, cover letter to the publisher, Joseph Milligan, on returning the corrected translation of A Treatise on Political Economy, by Frenchman Destutt de Tracy, October 25, 1818.

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.”

Declaration of Sentiments, preamble — Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Converence, July 19-20, 1848.