Category: Thought

It is a tolerably well-ascertained fact that men are still selfish. And that beings answering to this epithet will employ the power placed in their hands for their own advantage is self-evident. Directly or indirectly, either by hook or by crook, if not openly, then in secret, their private ends will be served. Granting the proposition that men are selfish, we cannot avoid the corollary, that those who possess authority will, if permitted, use it for selfish purposes.

Herbert Spencer, “The Constitution of the State,” Part 1, Chapter XX, §2 of Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed, (London: John Chapman, 1851).

Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right.

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

Whereas the governments of some low-income countries are improving their economics policies, in the United States the proliferation of political movements that view economics with disdain, along with apparent general public support for government market interventions, are in considerable measure contributing to the decline in the performance of the U.S. economy.

Theodore W. Schultz, Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (1981), p. 143-4.

Society . . . as it becomes more enlightened, should be very careful not to establish bodies of men who must necessarily be made foolish or vicious by the very constitution of their profession.

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

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person’s freedom.

Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics, trans. J.W. Semple, ed. with Iintroduction by Rev. Henry Calderwood (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1886) (3rd edition).

If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control.

William Graham Sumner, “The Forgotten Man” (1883).

Reason does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another.

Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 1784.

The left really thinks it controls thought and language. And so all they do is vomit up meaningless bullshit that nobody thinks is funny.

Roseanne Barr, on her podcast, explaining to Greg Gutfeld why leftists are no longer the good comedians.

The civil state regarded purely as a lawful state, is based on the following a priori principles:

• The freedom of every member of society as a human being.
• The equality of each with all the others as a subject.
• The independence of each member of a commonwealth as a citizen.

These principles are not so much laws given by an already established state, as laws by which a state can alone be established in accordance with pure rational principles of external human right.

Immanuel Kant, Theory and Practice (1791).