The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior “righteous indignation” — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.
What does it mean to be a conservative? I don’t even know anymore. I know what it means to me. It means to me, personal responsibility. That if I’ve done something wrong, its up to me to pay the price. It’s up to me to make it right.
To restore America we need less Marx and more Madison.
We’re giving our freedoms away. The American experiment was about freedom. Freedom to be stupid, freedom to fail, freedom to succeed.
We all know what the problems are: it’s tax and spend. One party will tax and spend, the other party won’t tax but will spend. It’s both of them together.
Oratory prevailed over science and experience.
The decline in the purchasing power of paper money was in obedience to the simplest laws in economics, but France had now gone beyond her thoughtful statesmen and taken refuge in unwavering optimism, giving any explanation of the new difficulties rather than the right one.