Category: Thought

“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.”

“Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society.”

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”

“I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”

Although government for the people by a beneficent elite is a conceptual possibility, it is a highly improbable one. Elites cannot be relied on to pursue individuals’ interests with anything like the consistency and intensity that individuals themselves regularly do: Benevolent despots are considerably more likely to remain despotic than benevolent. (Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference, p. 167)