Category: Thought

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

It is the true duty of every man to promote the happiness of his fellow creatures to the utmost of his power.
— William Wilberforce

When we think of eternity, and of the future consequences of all human conduct, what is there in this life that should make any man contradict the dictates of his conscience, the principles of justice, the laws of religion, and of God?

If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.

You may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know.

I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.
— Rose Wilder Lane

The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

A life of constant external enmity generates a code in which aggression, conquest, revenge, are inculcated, while peaceful occupations are reprobated. Conversely a life of settled internal amity generates a code inculcating the virtues conducing to harmonious cooperation — justice, honesty, veracity, regard for other’s claims. And the implication is that if the life of internal amity continues unbroken from generation to generation, there must result not only the appropriate code, but the appropriate emotional nature — a moral sense adapted to the moral requirements. Men so conditioned will acquire to the degree needful for complete guidance, that innate conscience which the intuitive moralists erroneously suppose to be possessed by mankind at large. There needs but a continuance of absolute peace externally and a rigorous insistence on nonaggression internally to ensure the molding of men into a form naturally characterized by all the virtues

Perhaps the soul of goodness in things evil is by nothing better exemplified than by the good thing, justice, which, in rudimentary form, exists within the evil thing revenge.