Category: Thought

“The U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.”

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.… Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-​disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”

“People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” 

“A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” 

“In Germany, they first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me – and by that time no one was left to speak up.” 

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.”

“Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.”