Category: Thought

Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. . . . [L]et every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing.

John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).

Art may make a suit of clothes; but nature must produce a man.

David Hume, “The Epicurean,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748).

Man’s being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.

José Ortega y Gasset, “Man Has No Nature,” in History as a System (1962).

Honour is a great check upon mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in a great measure, removed; since a man is sure to be approved of by his own party, for what promotes the common interest; and he soon learns to despise the clamours of adversaries.

David Hume, “Of The Independency of Parliament,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748).

[T]he direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but — from what we can judge to-day — of any civilisation.

José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chap.IX: “The Primitive and the Technical.”

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Chapter 4.

Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922), Part V.

A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason.

Surely there can be but one rule of right, if morality has an eternal foundation, and whoever sacrifices virtue, strictly so called, to present convenience, or whose duty is to act in such a manner, lives only for the passing day, and cannot be an accountable creature.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Sympathy which, a generation ago, was taking the shape of justice, is relapsing into the shape of generosity; and the generosity is exercised by inflicting injustice. Daily legislation betrays little anxiety that each shall have that which belongs to him, but great anxiety that he shall have that which belongs to somebody else. For while no energy is expended in so reforming our judicial administration that everyone may obtain and enjoy all he has earned, great energy is shown in providing for him and others benefits which they have not earned. Along with that miserable laissez-faire which calmly looks on while men ruin themselves in trying to enforce by law their equitable claims, there goes activity in supplying them, at other men’s cost, with gratis novel-reading!

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. 2, Part IV: “Justice” (1891), Chapter 5, “The Idea of Justice.”