Category: Thought

The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

I wanna be free

I want you to be free

A lot easier for me to be free if you are free.

He who carries self-regard far enough to keep himself in good health and high spirits, in the first place thereby becomes an immediate source of happiness to those around, and in the second place maintains the ability to increase their happiness by altruistic actions. But one whose bodily vigour and mental health are undermined by self-sacrifice carried too far, in the first place becomes to those around a cause of depression, and in the second place renders himself incapable, or less capable, of actively furthering their welfare. In estimating conduct we must remember that there are those who by their joyousness beget joy in others, and that there are those who by their melancholy cast a gloom on every circle they enter.

Society’s tacit assumption is that all normal persons are qualified for matrimony, and this is not so.

If a man has a *right* to marry, some woman must have the duty of marrying him; if a man has a *right* to rest, some other person must have the duty of supporting him. If rights are confused thus with desires, the mass of men must feel always that some vast, intangible conspiracy thwarts their attainment of what they are told is their inalienable birthright.

I regard marriage in the way that the French have of regarding it, as a partnership effected for certain definite purposes, essentially practical.

For several years now I have been trying to get various publishers to start some ambitious youth writing a book about work. The idea first struck me when I was doing some rather close reading in our Colonial history, and was impressed by the amount of actual labor, both of brawn and brain, that the Founding Fathers seemed to be able to put into a day, and keep putting in, day after day. I doubt that there is anything like it in the country now. Take, for instance, Mr. Jefferson’s journal of a three-months tour in France; consider the facilities he had, the kind of accommodations he found, the amount of time and energy that had to be put in on the mere business of living and getting about from place to place, and then reckon up in terms of actual work, the achieve- ments recorded in that journal. Also, figure up the net of work in one of John Adams’s days, from the time he got up until he went to bed, or one of John Quincy Adams’s, when he was Secretary of State. I remember, too, when I was reading the history of the early English buccaneers, that what struck me most forcibly was the amount of actual labor that they were capable of doing, and did do, without making any fuss about it. No publisher ever bit at my suggestion, however, which I think shows a lack of enterprise.

As far back as one can follow the run of civilization, it presents two fundamentally different types of political organization. This difference is not one of degree, but of kind. It does not do to take the one type as merely marking a lower order of civilization and the other a higher; they are commonly so taken, but erroneously. Still less does it do to classify both as species of the same genus — to classify both under the generic name of “government,” though this also, until very lately, has been done, and has always led to confusion and misunderstanding.

A good understanding of this error and its effects is supplied by Thomas Paine. At the outset of his pamphlet called Common Sense, Paine draws a distinction between society and government. While society in any state is a blessing, he says, “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” In another place, he speaks of government as “a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world.”