Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Cathedral,” The Atlantic Monthly (1846).
What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.
What is liberty? WHO WILL ALLOW ME TO DEFINE IT FOR HIM, AND AGREE BEFOREHAND TO SQUARE HIS LIFE BY MY DEFINITION? Who does not wish to see it first, and sit in judgment on it, and decide for himself as to its propriety? and who does not see that it is his own individualinterpretation of the word that he adopts? And who will agree to square his whole life by any rule, which, although good at present, may not prove applicable to all cases? Who does not wish to preserve his liberty to act according to the peculiarities or INDIVIDUALITIES of future cases, and to sit in judgment on the merits of each, and to change or vary from time to time with new developments and increasing knowledge? Each individual being thus at liberty at all times, would be SOVEREIGN OF HIMSELF. NO GREATER AMOUNT OF LIBERTY CAN BE CONCEIVED — ANY LESS WOULD NOT BE LIBERTY! Liberty defined and limited by others is slavery!
Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1852).
That’s the thing about Americans, they’re the most propagandized people in the world and they have no idea. People in China know when they’re being propagandized and people in the old Soviet Union knew … but people in America think that — “what? I’m just watching the news!”
Comedian Jimmy Dore on John Papola’s Dad Saves America podcast (March 13, 2025).
The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry.
I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place, because, such as it is, it is better than nothing.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Letter to William Lloyd Garrison (1853).
People who want to police “hate speech” hate speech.
Comedian Jimmy Dore on John Papola’s Dad Saves America podcast (March 13, 2025).
We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. Our landholders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval (June 12, 1816). The Latin phrase bellum omnium in omnia means “war of all things against all things,” and is Jefferson’s play upon bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning “the war of all against all,” which is the formulation that Thomas Hobbes gave to human existence in the state of nature in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651). Jefferson is certainly tipping his hat to his friend C.-F. Volney’s concept of this sort of war carried on within modern states, as discussed in The Ruins (1802), the bulk of which Jefferson himself translated from the French.