Category: Thought

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

Ben Franklin’s recommended motto for the Great Seal of the United States, August 1776.

All hereditary Government is in its nature tyranny. An heritable crown, or an heritable throne, or by what other fanciful name such things may be called, have no other significant explanation than that mankind are heritable property. To inherit a Government, is to inherit the people, as if they were flocks and herds.

Joseph Priestley, The Rights of Man (1791).

Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.

Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1738.

Le temps est un grand maître, dit-on;
le malheur est qu’il soit un maître inhumain qui tue ses élèves.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

From a letter by Hector Berlioz, November 1856, published in Pierre Citron (ed.) Correspondance générale (Paris: Flammarion, 1989) vol. 5, p. 390.

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

American composer and insurance innovator Charles Ives, as quoted in “Charles Ives’ Rambunctious ‘Fourth Of July,’ NPR Music (July 3, 2008).

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.

Oft attributed to Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr., 38th Vice President of the United States.

I am proud of my journalistic philosophy — to tell the world things people do not want me to reveal, to advocate limited government, economic freedom, and a strong, prudent America — and to have fun doing it. For the sober-sided younger generations of journalists, having fun may seem unserious. But it was the kind of journalism that prevailed when I started.

Robert D. Novak, The Prince of Darkness (2007), p. 14.

Every government that has cheapened its currency has been knavishly false to a trust; so have those which, like ours, use public funds to subsidize large-scale gambling and swindling.

Albert Jay Nock, as quoted in Robert M. Thornton, editor, Cogitations from Albert Jay Nock (The Nockian Society, 1970).

I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out. It must be a good thing if everybody praises it like that. If our government has been willing to go to war and sacrifice billions of dollars and millions of men for the idea I think that I ought to give the thing a trial. The only thing that keeps me from pitching head long into this thing is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Crazy for This Democracy,” Negro Digest (December 1945).