Category: Thought

The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love.

Gore Vidal, Julian (1964), sixth chapter.

It was quite dark when he went by the towers of Tor, where archers shoot ivory arrows at strangers lest any foreigner should alter their laws, which are bad, but not to be altered by mere aliens.

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller,” The Book of Wonder (1912).

On Tuesday Marsha Blackburn, the senior United States senator from Tennessee, asked Judge Jackson a simple question: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” Jackson, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and sometime supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review answered: “Can I provide a definition? No. I can’t. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.” The judge, brow furrowed, seemed equal parts annoyed and genuinely confused.

Declan Leary, “I’m Not a Biologist,” The American Conservative, March 26, 2022, relating a moment in Judge Jackson’s interrogation by the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination to the Supreme Court.

In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.

Warren Gamaliel Harding, in his address to the 1916 Republican convention.

All laws having for their object the protection of working men, the substitution of authoritative arrangements for private contracts, the prohibition of some, the sanctioning of others, are born of the spirit of privilege.

Yves Guyot, “Nature of ‘Labour Laws,’” The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), p. 152.

The ancient maxim makes the sum of a man’s legal duty to his fellow men to be simply this: ‘To live honestly, to hurt no one, to give to every one his due.’

Lysander Spooner, Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882).

It is not wise warfare to throw your ammunition to the enemy unless you throw it from the cannon’s mouth.

Benjamin R. Tucker, “Passive Resistance,” Individual Liberty (1926).

The science of mine and thine — the science of justice — is the science of all human rights; of all a man’s rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Lysander Spooner, Natural Law; or, The Science of Justice, Section I, page 5 (1882).

It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson’s presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men.

Alexander Berkman, editor, Selected works of Voltairine de Cleyre (1914), p. 130.

The employer is, in the nature of things, neither the religious guide, the political guide, nor the intellectual guide of his workpeople. . . .
The workmen are under only one obligation with regard to their employer, and this is the performance of the productive labour for which they receive their wages. If the employer wishes to exact anything beyond this, he is guilty of an error. He invites servility, revolt, or hypocrisy; and is preparing for himself a terrible return.

Yves Guyot, “The Socialism of Employers,” The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), p. 229-230.