Category: Thought

“How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?”

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

“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.”