Tibor Machan’s Collection of Poignant Quotes

Related

• Remembering Tibor Machan, Libertarian Mentor and Friend: Reflections on a Giant
• Machan, A Brief on Left Libertarianism—Is it an Oxymoron? (unpublished, 2009)

As I mentioned in my recent post, Machan, A Brief on Left Libertarianism—Is it an Oxymoron? (unpublished, 2009), an odd gmail glitch recently placed an Aug. 12, 2009 email from Tibor Machan at the top of my gmail inbox, with this note: “Hi, Stephan: Perhaps you would like to use the attached discussion note, ‘A Brief on Left-Libertarianism,'” and containing this short article. This was sent to me around the time I started Libertarian Papers and was obviously meant as a submission to that journal.

I see now that he sent me another email Nov. 24, 2012: “Here is a fairly long collection of quotations I have assembled and thought would send you as a gift! If not interested, please simply delete.” Possibly he also intended it for  Libertarian Papers. I ignored it at the time but it appears not to be published online so here it is, with no edits (since I cannot ask Tibor to approve).

 

Tibor Machan’s Collection of Poignant Quotes

Tibor R. Machan

[sent to Stephan Kinsella Nov. 24, 2012]

Bannister on Theories:
Aristotle on Skepticism
Coase on economic man
Salzman on Comparative Political Economy
Quine on Cultural Relativism
Roger Sperry on Reductionism
James O’Brien
Rand on Human Nature
de Tocqueville on business
Jostein Gaarner on the supernatural
Arthur Miller on salesmen
Business Besmirched:
Life as the basis of values:
Positive Rights:
Communists and Nazis:
K. Marx on non-violent revolutions:
Karl Marx on international revolution:
Marx on free markets:
Marx on Individuality:
Marx on exchange:
Willard Gaylin on the individual:
S.Maugham on Aristotle’s mistaken essentialism:
Graham Greene on Altruism:
Dick Francis on Business ethics:
Shirley Christian on Marxist Imperialism:
The Folly of Intuitionism:
F. A. Hayek on prices:
Socrates on Reason:
Mill on Radical ideas:
Homo economicus:
On the homo economicus conception of human behavior:
Andrei Gromyko on human rights:
The New Testament on fairness:
Emerson on freedom
On positive liberty:
On State Ownership:
Adam Smith on virtue:
Adam Smith on morality:
Social Sciences:
Positive Freedom:
Property Rights and Morality:
Economics and Morality:
Milton Friedman:
Gary Becker:
George Stigler:
James Buchanan:
E. J. Mishan:
Murray N. Rothbard:
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega:
Judge Robert Bork, on the First Amendment:
Judge Robert Bork’s definition of “explicit political speech”:
Bill of Rights:
Holmes’s on Economic Liberty and the Constitution:
Individualism
Christian Wholism:
Hobbesian Ideas Today
Self-Defeating Capitalism
Hobbes and liberal capitalism:
Communist Tactics: Lenin
Communist Tactics: Manuilski
Austrian Subjective Values
Reason
Liberty
Altruism
Edmund Burke
Pablo Picasso
Michael de Montaigne
David Kelley & Jeff Scott
Herman Hesse on Dualism
Hegel on Altruism?
Hegel on Feelings
Lamont on free will
Clark on Determinism
Kennan on sex
Aristotle on Self-Love
Alasdair MacIntyre
Altruism (Maclagan)
Stephen Hawking on Free Will & Determinism
William Pitt (younger) on “necessity”
Fernando Ray’s character in Luis Bunuel’s film, Tristana (1970)
Tim Sandlin on thinking
KING CORMAC, early 9th century
Bernard J. F. Lonegran on Free Judgment
Dick Francis, in To The Hilt
Dick Francis on legislation:
Fareed Zakaria on democracy:
Machan on Existence:
Susan Wolf on Moral Sainthood:
William Greider on anti-capitalist in novels:
Daniel Webster on good intentions and government
Los Salisbury on the blow up fallacy:
Adam Smith about collusion:
Thomas Reid on arguing for the obvious:
William Graham Sumner on Morality:
Aristotle Distorted:
Mill on God & Goodness:
Peter McWilliams on advocating consensualism:
On Choosing to Think:
The RC Message:
Selfishness:
Hayek on Freedom
Machan on Blaming:
George Santayana on Uniformity
Rothbard on Nuclear Weapons
Weinberg on Determinism:
Nagel on Ideas:
Joseph on Cause:
Silvan Tomkins on infantile experience:
Spencer on Poverty:
Rorty on ethics:
Nussbaum on Libertarianism:
Aquinas on Free Will:
Adam Smith on Market Motivation:
Machan on the “blow up fallacy”:
Rights as Powers:
Kant on coercion:
Machan On Prudence:
Pericles on law v. force:
Religion and Liberty:
Thucydides on the commons:
Cary J. Nederman on Rights:
Von Mises on Liberalism:
Charles Baudelaire on Commerce:
Ross & van den Haag on Free Will and Morality:
Roger Trigg on Realism & Objectivity:
Plato on self-interest:
Albert Einstein on Ethics:
Luck:
Blaise Pascal on Thinking:
Wittgenstein on Thinking:
Mencius on the role of thinking:
Greer Garson on Rights:
Parker Thomas Moon on Individualism:
Murdoch on Meta-Ethics:
John Acton on liberty:
W. H. Auden on altruism:
John Philpot Curran and Wendell Phillips:
Hazlitt on the Justice of Liberty:
Not “Our” values:
Jesus on trade:
Nietzsche on Disciples:
Maugham on Freedom:
Milton Friedman on morality:
Friedman on Sin:
Rawls on Self-interest & Friendship:
Anonymous on Democracy:
Josephson on business ethics:
Spiritualism in Bible:
Aquinas on Free Will:
Montaigne on Misanthropy:
Diogenes Laertius reporting on Diogenes , the Cynic:
Machan on gaining from bad institutions:
J. S. Caldwell on Government:
George Orwell on Autobiographies:
Barnett on the Constitution:
Susan Sontag on Communism:
Chillingworth on skepticism:
St. Augustine on Happiness:
Roth on tribalism:
Adam Smith & Invisible Hand:
Sam Adams on rights:
Dr. Jonhson on stockbrokers:
Ayn Rand on the Mind-Body Problem:
Theodore Schick on borderlines:
On Democracy:
Ludwig von Mises on Creeping Socialism:
Galbraith on modern conservatives
John Locke on Delegated Powers:
James Madison on Consent and Majority Rule:
Shakespeare’s Shylock:
Michael Ledeen on US and War:
Leo Strauss on Standards:
C. I. Lewis on Principles:
Leo Strauss on standards of right:
Tatyana Tolstaya on Collectivism:
Nagel on Forced Generosity:
Duffel on Libertarian Autonomy:
Machan back at Duffel:
Oprah Winfrey on Wealth:
Thomas Paine on Taxation:
Reductionism from All the King’s Men:
Kolakowski on coercive communities:
Aristotle on choice:
Amartya Sen on Rights:
Menckenism:
Benjamin Libet:
Rumsfeld:
Friedrich Ratzel:
Evelyn Waugh on the Welfare State [on BBC 1953]:
Karl Marx on the human Essence:
Will Durant about Robespierre:
John Benson on Singer’s Doctrine:
Versenyi on knowing human nature:
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall:
Sherman Alexie (Flight):
Ayn Rand on selfishness:
John Maynard Keynes on freedom:
“Lord” Chesterfield:
Ted Honderich:
Alan Brinkley on the New Deal:
Natural not conventional Rights:
Lincoln on Equality:
Oliver Cromwell on Abusing liberty:
Abraham Lincoln:
George Eliot:
Walter Lippman on Power:
Lincoln: Philosopher:
Shelley on Power:
Jewish sage Hillel:
John Stossel on Climate Change:
Frederick Bastiat ‘s “Broken Window Fallacy” (from Wikipedia):
Contra Sunstein:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:
Hudson following Comte:
From On Liberty, John Stuart Mill:
Abraham Lincoln on wealth redistribution:
Oliver Wendell Holmes
John Rawls on Character:
Aristotle on Tragedy of Commons:
John Maynard Keynes on Ideas:
Baruch Spinoza, on government:
Groucho Marx on Politics:
Maugham on animal rights?
Maugham on power:
Mencken’s public choice theory:
Bruce Ackerman on FDR and the US Constitution:
Richard Epstein: What is the police power?
Henning Mankell on objectivity:
Charles de Gaulle:
Heilbroner on socialism and labor:
Scott Turow on human reason:
Judge Richard Posner ‘s Subjectivism:
Nazism:
Phillis Diller funny:
Machan on “ought implies can”
Stiegler on ethics:
George Orwell:
Keynes on his ideas & the Third Reich:
Dietrick Dörner on good intentions:

 

Bannister on Theories:

“… the psychologist cannot present a picture of man which patently contradicts his behavior in presenting that picture.”  From Borger & Cioffi/Bannister, eds., Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences (Cambridge UP, 1970), p.  417.

 

Aristotle on Skepticism:

“It is in the highest degree evident that neither any one of those who maintain this view nor any one else is really in this position. For why does a man walk to Megara and not stay at home, when he thinks he ought to be walking there? Why does he not walk early some morning into a well or over a precipice, if one happens to be in his way? Why do we observe him guarding against this, evidently because he does not think that falling in is alike good and not good? Evidently, then, he judges one thing to be better and another worse.” Metaphysics 1006b (IV, iv, 40)

 

Coase on economic man:

“There is no reason to suppose that most human beings are engaged in maximizing anything unless it be unhappiness, and even this with incomplete success” (Ronald Coase, The Firm, the Market, and the Law, U of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 4.

 

Salzman on Comparative Political Economy:

“’Well . . . the world is basically divided into two kinds of countries—communist countries and capitalist countries.  A capitalist country is a place where people own things privately and can become more wealthy than other people.  They use money to get whatever they want, and can oppress poor people.  A communist country is a place where the government owns everything.  That way, everyone is equal, and no one can be oppressed.  Without money, people share willingly with each other and help each other rather than just helping themselves.  Everyone works for the good of the people, not just for personal gain.’ Colonel Sun thought about this for a moment, then burst into derisive laughter.  ‘The capitalists sound pretty normal,’ he observed, ‘but that communist arrangement sounds like a lot of crap to me.’” [The Laughing Sutra, p. 58]

There is a story that Communism, Capitalism, and Socialism decided to have lunch together one day.  Communism and Capitalism were on time, but Socialism arrived late.  He said, “I’m sorry I am late, but I had to queue up to buy some sausage.  Communism said, “What’s a sausage?,” and Capitalism said “What’s a queue?” [The Laughing Sutra, p. 210]

Quine on Cultural Relativism:

Truth, says the cultural relativist, is culture-bound.  But if it were, then he, within his own culture, ought to see his own culture-bound truth as absolute.  He cannot proclaim cultural relativism without rising above it, and he cannot rise above it without giving it up. [Willard Van Orman Quine, “On empirically equivalent systems of the world,” Erkenntnis, Vol. 9 (1975), pp. 327-8 (pp. 313-28).]

 

Roger Sperry on Reductionism:

We no longer seek ultimate nature of reality within the smallest physical elements, nor in their innermost essence.  Instead the search is redirected to focus primarily on the patterning of the elements, on their differential pacing and timing and the progressive compounding of patterns of patterns, and on their evolving nature and complexity. (American Psychologist, Vol. 50, No. 7, 506)

 

John O’Brien:

“The desire of one man to live on the fruits of another’s labor is the original sin of the world.” [George Seldes, ed., The Great Thoughts (Ballentine Books, 19850, p. 314]

 

Rand on Human Nature:

“Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men: living in a human society is his proper way of life – but only on certain conditions.  Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal.  He is a contractual animal.  He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreement they entered).” [“A Nation’s Unity,” Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. II, 2, p. 3.]

 

Alexis de Tocqueville on business:

“The transactions of business opened a new road to power, and the financier rose to a station of political influence in which he was at once flattered and despised.” [Democracy in America, p. xxxvi]

 

Jostein Gaarner on the supernatural:

“So you don’t believe in anything supernatural then.”

“We’ve already talked about that.  Even the term ‘supernatural’ is a curious one.  No, I suppose I believe that there is only one nature.  But that, on the other hand, is absolutely astonishing.” (Sophie’s World, p. 360)

 

Arthur Miller on salesmen:

His was a salesman’s profession, if one may describe such dignified slavery as a profession…(“In Memoriam,” The New Yorker, December 25, 1995 & January 1, 1996)

 

Business Besmirched:

In 1769 [Benjamin] Franklin had written to his friend Henry Home, Lord Cames, the Scottish jurist and philosopher: `There seems to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth.  The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors.  This is robbery.  The second is by commerce, which is generally cheating.  The third by agriculture, the only honest way….'”[from Forest MacDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum]

 

Ayn Rand on Value:

Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action.  Epistemolo­gically, the concept of “value” is geneti­cally depend­ent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of “life.”  To speak of “value” as apart from “life” is worse than a contra­diction in terms.  It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. . . .In answer to those philo­sophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality [i.e., who pose the “is/ought” gap prob­lem], let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life . . . .The fact that a living entity is determines that it ought to do. [The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet Books, 1967), pp. 15-17]

 

Karl Popper:

I think that values enter the world with life; and if there is life without consciousness (as I think there may well be, even in ani­mals and man, for there appears to be such a thing as dream­less sleep) then, I suggest, there will also be objective values, even without consciousness.  [Karl Popper, Unending Quest (Glas­gow: Fontana/Col­lins, 1974), p. 194]

 

Positive Rights:

Socialist rights are more positive, less dependent on the activa­tion of the right-holder, more directed toward the protection and fur­therance of those concerns which express the needs of active and creatively productive social beings than is the case with capita­list rights.  Socialist rights are more organizational than politi­cal in that they inform the co-operative social effort rather than represent demands to be disputed and traded-off against each other.  They are devices to secure the benefits which can be derived from harmonious communal living, not protections for the indivi­dual against the preda­tions of others.  Socialist rights are highly dependent on others fulfilling their correlative obligations, but are not conditional on the right-holders fulfilling their own obligations, although in prac­tice so­cialist rights and socialist duties tend to coalesce, as in the case of the right and duty to work.  [Tom Campbell, The Left and Rights, London: Rout­ledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 213]

 

Communists and Nazis:

[There is] the profound difference between Marxists, who identi­fied with the weak and spoke the language of social justice, and fas­cists, who identified with an elite and spoke the language of racism and violence. [Victor Navasky, Naming Names, p. 411]

 

1. Marx on non-violent revolutions:

You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration and we do not deny that there are countries–such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland– where workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. [The Karl Marx Library Vol. I: On Revolution, ed., Soul R. Padover (McGraw- Hill, 1971), p. 64]

 

Marx on Revolution:

If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolu­tion in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting-point for a communist development. [Karl Marx, Selected Writings (Oxford UP, 1977), ed., D. McLennan]

 

Marx on Economic Man:

The economists express it like this: each person has his private interests in mind, and nothing else; as a consequence he serves eve­ryone’s private interests, i.e., the general interest, without wishing to or knowing that he is.  The irony of this is not that the totality of private interest–which is the same as the gene­ral interest–can be attained by the individual’s following his own interest.  Rather it could be inferred from this abstract phrase that everyone hinders the satisfaction of everyone else’s interest, that instead of a general affirmation, the result of this war of all against all is rather a general negation.  The point is rather that private interest is itself already a social­ly determined interest, which can only be achieved within the conditions estab­lished by society and through the means that society affords, and that it is thus linked to the reproduction of these conditions and means.  It is certainly the interest of pri­vate individuals that is at stake;  but its content, as well as the form and the means of its realisation, is only given by social condi­tions independent of all these individuals. [Grund­risse, New York: Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 65-66]

This kind of liberty [free competition] is thus at the same time the most complete suppression of all individual liberty and total subjuga­tion of individuality to social conditions which take the form of material forces–and even of all-powerful objects that are independent of the individuals relating to them.  The only rational answer to the deification of free competition by the middle-class prophets, or its diabolisation by the socialists, lies in its own development. [Ibid, p. 131]

 

Marx on Individuality:

Free individuality, which is founded on the universal development of individuals and the domination of their communal and social producti­vity, which has become their social power, is the third stage [of society]. [Grundrisse, NY: H&R, 1970, p. 67]

 

Marx on exchange:

. . .the exchange relationship establishes itself as a force exter­nal­ly opposed to the producers, and independent of them. [Ibid, p. 61]

The private exchange of all the products of labour, capacities and activities is opposed to the distribution founded on the sponta­neous or political hierarchy of individuals within patriar­chal, ancient or feudal societies (where exchange only plays a secondary role and hardly affects the entire life of communities, since it only occurs between them and does not dominate all the relation­ships of production and commerce). But private exchange is opposed just as much to the free exchange of associated indi­viduals on the basis of collective appropriation and control of the means of production. . . .[Ibid., 68]

William S. Maugham:

Looking for the special function of man Aristotle decided that since he shares growth with the plants and perception with the beasts, and alone has a rational element, his function is the activity of the soul.  From this he concluded, not as you would have thought sensible, that man should cultivate the three forms of activity which he as­cribes to him, but that he should pursue only that which is especial to him.  Philosophers and moralists have looked at the body with misgivings.  They have pointed out that its satisfactions are brief.  But a pleasure is nonetheless a pleasure because it does not please forever. [W. S. Maugham, The Summing Up (Pocket Books, 1967), pp. 35-6]

 

I have never found that suffering improves the character.  Its influence to refine and ennoble is a myth.  A Writer’s Notebook [Penguin, 1967], p. 147.

 

I have suffered from poverty and the anguish of unrequited love, disappointment, disillusion, lack of opportunity and recognition, want of freedom; and I know that they made me envious and uncharitable, irritable, selfish, unjust; prosperity, success, happiness, have made me a better man. [Ibid]

 

To some, Prometheus, chained to his rock and strong in his unconquerable courage, is a more inspiring example than that other, hanging on a shameful cross, who besought His Father to forgive His enemies because they knew not what they did.  Resignation is too close to apathy for the spirited mind. [Ibid, 148]

 

…intuition, [is] a subject upon which certain philosophers have reared an imposing edifice of surmise, but which seems to me to offer as insecure a foundation for any structure more substantial than a Castle in Spain as a ping pong ball wavering on a jet of water in a shooting gallery. [Ibid, 325]

 

I have read much philosophy, and though I do not see how it is possible to refuse intellectual assent to certain theories of the Absolute, I can find nothing in them to induce me to depart from my instinctive disbelief in what is usually meant by the word religion.  I have little patience with the writers who try to reconcile in one conception the Absolute of the metaphysician with the God of Christianity.  But if I had had any doubts, the [First World] war would have effectually silenced them.

 

The majority of us are fairly decent, doing our best in that state of life in which chance has placed us; and if we believe in a judgment we feel that God has too much wisdom and good sense to bother much about failings which we mortals have no difficulty in forgiving in our neighbors. [Ibid, 145-6]

 

Willard Gaylin on the Individual:

We have created an artifact, the isolated self, that does not exist in biological truth.  (On Being and Becoming Human [New York: Penguin Books, 1991])

 

 

 

Graham Greene on Altruism:

None of us has a right to forget anyone.  Except ourselves. Looser Takes All [Penguin, 1993, p. 51]

 

Dick Francis on Business ethics:

There was no particular secret, as far as I knew, about where the finance for Sandcastle had come from, but it was up to Oliver Knowels to reveal it, not me.  I thought Calder would have been interested, but bankers’ ethics as usually kept me quiet.  [Dick Francis, Banker, Putnam, 1982, p. 106]

 

Shirley Christian on Marxist Imperialism:

Internationalism–the assistance of fellow revolutionaries–is a key element of the faith to Marxist-Leninists, and telling them not to practice it is like telling priests not to pray.  [Shirley Christian, The Atlantic, August 1983, p. 20]

 

The Folly of Intuitionism:

To us today the revelation of the legal mur­ders and cruelties con­nected with the trial of children are revolting.  We have become so habituated to the kindly and even anxious atmosphere of the Child­ren’s Courts, that it is hard to believe that the full ceremonial, the dread ordeal, of the Assize Courts could have been brought into use against little children of seven years and upwards–judges uttering their cruel legal platitudes; the chap­lain sitting by assen­ting; the Sheriff in his impressive uniform; ladies coming to the Court to be enter­tained by such a sight–the spectacle of a terrified little child about to receive the death sentence which the verdict of 12 men, prob­ably fathers of families themselves, had given the judge power to pass.  [Ernest W. Pettifer, Punishments of Former Days (East Ardsley, England:  EP Publi­shing, Ltd., 1974), pp. 35-6]

 

1. A. Hayek on prices:

[Hayek notes] how little the individual participants need know in order to be able to take the right action.  In abbre­viated form, by a kind of symbol, only to those concerned.  It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movements of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.  [F. A. Hayek, Indi­vidualism & Economic Order, pp. 86-7]

 

Socrates on Reason:

Not for the first time, but always, I am the sort of person who is persuaded by nothing in me except the proposition which seems to me the best when I reason about it. [Socrates]

 

Mill on Radical ideas:

Every great movement must experience three stages: Ridicule, dis­cus­sion, adoption.  [J.S. Mill]

 

 

 

Homo economicus:

It is a basic dictum of economic theory that all economic agents, including consumers, act to improve their “utility” or self-assessed well-being.  Nicholas Eberstadt, “Are smokers rational?” The Public Interest, No. 111 (Spring 1993), p. 109.

 

Andrei Gromyko on human rights:

Human Rights! New York is where you should look for viola­tions.  There, the people have to sleep on the sidewalks and sift through garbage cans.  [Quoted in Time 6/25/84 p. 23]

 

The New Testament on fairness:

The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in  the morning to hire men to work his vineyard.  He agreed to pay them  a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.  About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the  marketplace doing nothing.  He told them ‘You also go and work in  my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went.  He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and  did the same thing.  About the eleventh hour he went out and found  still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been  standing here all day long doing nothing?’ ‘Because no one has  hired us,’ they answered. He said to them, ‘You also go and work in  my vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to  his fore­man, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, begin­ning  with the last ones hired and going to the first.’ The workers who  were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius.  So when those came who were hired first, they expected to  receive more.  But each one of them also re­ceived a dena­rius.  When  they received it, they began to grumble against the land­owner.   ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said,  ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of  the work and the heat of the day.’ But he answered one of them,  ‘Friend, I am not being unfair to you.  Didn’t you agree to work  for a denarius? Take your pay and go.  I want to give the man who  was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do  what I want with my own money?  Or are you envious because I am  generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.   [Matthew 20]

 

Emerson on freedom

Intellect annuls Fate.  So far as a man thinks, he is free….The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom.  [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate”]

 

On positive liberty:

We shall probably all agree that freedom, rightly understood, is the greatest of blessings; that its attainment is the true end of all our efforts as citizens.  But when we thus speak of freedom, we should consider carefully what we mean by it.  We do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion.  We do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespective of what it is that we like.  We do not mean a freedom that can be enjoyed by one man or one set of men at the cost of a loss of freedom to others.  When we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, some­thing that we do or enjoy in common with others. We mean by it a power which each man exercises through the help or securi­ty given him by his fellow-men, and which he in turn helps to secure for them. When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing develop­ment and exercise on the whole of those powers of contribu­ting to social good with which we believe the mem­bers of the socie­ty to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves … [T. H. Green, “Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,” in B. J. Diggs, ed., The State, Justice, and the Common Good (Glenville, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1974), ori­ginally published in 1881, p. 215]

 

On State Ownership:

. . . in a society where everything is nationalised and is the proper­ty of the state, anybody can be expropriated and subject to export. The East German Minister of Culture once announced in Leipzig that “Unsere Literatur gehort uns (Our literature be­longs to us!) . . . .” What he meant was that it didn’t belong to you, or to some “common national culture of two separate states (which the DDR’s constitution still mentions), most cer­tainly not to the shared language or the outside world.  In Germany the phrase for chattel slaves or indentured servants was Leibeigenen, for the bodies belonged to their owners; now we have the new concept of Geisteigene, for minds and spirits are also part of the new social property relations.  When a bureaucracy considers itself to be the owner of literature, then it has the absolute personal right not only to cultivate its own garden but also to remove ruth­lessly such weeds as it deems harmful. [Francois Bondy, “European Diary, Exist This Way,” Encounter, 4/81, pp. 42-3]

 

Adam Smith on virtue:

Ancient moral philosophy proposed to investi­gate wherein consis­ted the happiness and perfection of a man, considered not only as an individual, but as the member of a family, of a state, and of the great society of mankind.  In that philosophy the duties of human life were treated of as subservient to the happiness and perfection of human life.  But when moral, as well as natural philosophy, came to be taught only as subservient to theology, the duties of human life were treated of as chiefly subservient to the happiness of a life to come.  In the ancient philosophy the perfec­tion of virtue was represented as necessarily productive to the person who possessed it, of the most perfect happiness in this life.  In the modern philosophy it was frequently represented as almost always inconsistent with any degree of happiness in this life, and heaven was to be earned by penance and mortification, not by the liberal, generous, and spirited conduct of a man.  By far the most important of all the different branches of phi­losophy became in this manner by far the most corrupted. [The Wealth of Nations, Modern Library Edition, page 726]

 

Adam Smith on morality:

It is not the love of our neighbour, it is not the love of mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues.  It is a stronger love, a more powerful love, which generally takes place upon such occasions: the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own cha­racter. [The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapo­lis, Indiana: Liber­ty Classics,  1759, 1976), Pt. III, Ch. 3, p. 235.]

Social Sciences:

. . . There is a growing dissatisfaction throughout these discip­lines [the social sciences . . . sociology, econo­mics, political sciences, and psychology], a sense that time-honored methods and assumptions, based largely on the natural sciences, are conceptual­ly and morally bankrupt and need to be replaced by more sophisti­cated models.  After so many failed prophecies, so much trivial research, and so little progress toward the discovery of the “laws” of social behavior, the refrain with which conventional empirical studies typically end–“More research is needed”–is beginning to sound hollow indeed.  Hillary Putnam of Harvard, once a champion of a more traditional notion of scientific knowledge, is one of a number of philosophers who now question the very idea of a social science.  We would do better, he says, to talk more modestly of “the social studies.” [Louis A. Sass, “Anthropology’s Native Prob­lems,” Harper’s Magazine, May ’86, p. 50]

 

Positive Freedom:

The highest type of freedom–freedom in the ethical sphere–is the guidance of one’s actions by the living, actual principles of one’s community, clearly understood and deliberately accepted, and in secure confidence that other community members will act in the same way. [Z. A. Pelczynski, “The Hegelian Conception of the State,” in Z. A. Pel­czynski, ed., Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 9]

 

Property Rights and Morality:

Of course, in a world in which many people coexist, and which, partly because of the fact, exhibits the phenomenon of scarcity, there is no possibility of respecting another unless one can define both oneself and the other, at least in the sense of the ability to determine where the one ends and the other begins.  In verbal communication the boundary is obvious enough: people are biolo­gically distinct entities.  But in other sorts of interaction the situation is different: people use many “things” that are not part of their biological organism, and when they use them they turn them into means for the realization of their purposes–they bestow a meaning on them (grain becomes food, clay becomes building mate­rial, and so on).  But many different people could use the same “thing” as means for many different and incom­patible purposes. (Does the grain become food for human beings or for someone’s collection of exotic birds?  Does it become “my food” or “your food”?)  In order to respect others as rational agents we must know the distinction between “mine” and “thine.” [Frank Van Dun, “Econo­mics and the Limits of Value-Free Science,” Reason Papers, No. 11 (Spring 1986), p. 27]

 

Economics and Morality:

To explain economics and then withhold moral judgments seem to me to be wrong.  You leave a conflict between law and economics unre­solved.  The parallel with biology isn’t fair.  Biology doesn’t purport to deal with human behavior, and economics does claim to explain such behavior.  It deals not with cells or stones but with human beings, and human beings have moral compo­nents.  Your philo­sophy doesn’t accommodate those components.  [Judge Harold Leven­thal, District of Columbia, quoted in “Judges Discover the World of Economics,” by Walter Guzzardi, Jr., Furtune, May 21, 1979, p. 60]

Milton Friedman:

. . . every individual serves his own private interest . . . . The great Saints of history have served their ‘private interest’ just as the most money grubbing miser has served his interest.  The private interest is whatever it is that drives an individual. “The Line We Dare Not Cross,” Encounter, 11/76:11

 

Gary Becker:

The combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflin­chingly,  form the heart of the economic approach as I see it. The Economic  Approach to Human Behavior [U. of Choice Press, 1976]

 

George Stigler:

. . . Man is eternally a utility-maximizer–in his home, in his office (be it public or private), in his church, in his scienti­fic work–in short, everywhere.  Lecture II, Tanner Lectures, Harvard University, April 1980.  In Richard McKenzie, The Limits of Econo­mic Science [Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff Publ., 1983], p. 6.

 

James Buchanan:

. . . once the body politic begins to get overly concerned about the distribution of the pie under existing property-rights as­signments and legal rules, once we begin to think either about the personal gains from law-breaking, privately or publicly, or about the disparities between existing imputations and those estimated to be forthcoming under some idealized anarchy, we are necessarily precluding and forestalling the achievement of po­tential structural changes that might increase the size of the pie for all.  Too much concern for [distributive] “justice” acts to insure that “growth” will not take place, and for reasons much more basic than the familiar economic incentives arguments. [Reason Papers, 1975]

 

Politicians and bureaucrats are seen as ordinary persons, and  “politics” is viewed as a set of arrangements, a game if you will, in  which many players with quite disparate objectives interact so as to  generate a set of outcomes that may not be either internally consistent or efficient. [“Why Governments ‘Got Out of Hand’,” New York  Times, October 26, 1986]

 

Ludwig von Mises:

Human action is necessarily always rational…. When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless.  The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man…. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented.  [Human Action, p. 19]

 

1. J. Mishan:

[the criticism] would be more compelling . . . if the declared aim of [e.g.,] a Communist regime were that of simulating the free market in order to produce much the same assortment of goods.  We should bear in mind, however, that the economic objectives of a Commu­nist government include that of deliberately reducing the amounts of consumer goods which would have been produced in a market economy so as to release resources for a more rapid build-up  of basic industries.  (E. J. Mishan, “Fact, Faith, & Myth, Changing Concepts of the Free Market,” Encounter [November 1986], p. 66.)

 

Murray N. Rothbard:

“There is no distributional process apart from the production and exchange processes of the market; hence the very concept of ‘distribution’ becomes meaningless on the free market.  Since ‘distribution’ is simply the result of the free exchange process, and since this process benefits all participants on the market and increases social utility, it follows directly that the ‘distributional’ results of the free market also increase social utility.” “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” in Mary Sennholz, ed., On Freedom and Free Enterprise [New York: Van Nostrand, 1965], p. 251.

 

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega:

I always think of freedom in the plural. Freedom is for the  people here, not for the individual.  Freedom has an integral  character linking the individual to the group.  It is not simply  what the individual feels, it is the action of the individual  within society which organizes the rights of each to the benefit of  all.  Society limits, of course, those aspects of individual  freedom that go against the common effort in all phases of life.  [Quoted in Peter Davis, Where is Nicaragua? (New York: Simon &  Schuster, 1986).]

 

Judge Robert Bork, on the First Amendment:

Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political.  There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.  Moreover, within that category of speech we ordinarily call politi­cal, there should be no constitutional obstruction to laws making criminal any speech that advocates forcible overthrow of the government or the violation of any law. [“Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” Indiana Law Journal, vol. 47 (1971), pp. 20 ff.]

 

Judge Robert Bork’s definition of “explicit political speech”:

Speech concerned with governmental behavior, policy, or personnel, whether the governmental unit involved is executive, legislative, judicial or administrative. . . .  Explicitly political speech is speech about how we are governed, and that category therefore includes a wide range of evaluation, criticism, electioneering, and propaganda. . . .  It does not cover scientific, educational, commercial, or literary expressions as such. . . . [A novel] may have impact upon attitudes that affect politics, but it would not for that reason receive judicial protection.  [Ibid., p. 28]

 

Bill of Rights:

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to estab­lish them as legal principles to be applied by the Courts.  One’s right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections. [U. S. Supreme Court in West Virginia State   Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)]

 

Holmes on Economic Liberty and the Constitution:

“The 14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics” [Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45 (1905)], meaning, of course, that the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment was not intended to apply to economic liberty, including freedom of con­tract.

 

Individualism

Western individualism is . . .far from expressing the common experience of humanity.  Taking a world view, one might almost regard it as an eccentricity among cultures.  [Colin Morris, The Disco­very of the Individual 1050-1200 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 2]

 

Karl Marx on Individualism

[t]he further back we go into history, the more the individual, and, therefore, the producing individual seems to depend on and belong to a larger whole: at first it is, quite naturally, the family and the clan, which is but an enlarged family; later on, it is the community growing up in its different forms out of the clash and the amalgamation of claims.  It is only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, that the different forms of social union confront the individual as a mere means to his private ends, as an external necessity. [Karl Marx, Grudrisse, p. 17]

        

Christian Wholism:

… every part of the community belongs to the whole … [St. Augustine, quoted in Thomas Beuchamp, ed., Ethical Issues in Death & Dying, Englewood-Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984, p. 103.]

 

Hobbesian Ideas Today

Deep thinkers who look everywhere for the mysterious causes of poverty, ignorance, crime and war need look no further than their own mirrors.  We are all born into this world poor and ignorant, and with thoroughly selfish and barbaric impulses.  Those of us who turn out any other way do so largely through the efforts of others who civilized us before we got big enough to do too much damage to the world and ourselves.  But for these efforts, we might well be on welfare or in the penitentiary. [Thomas Sowell, Quoted in “The Help That is Self-Sown,” Inquiry, December 21, 1987.]

 

Self-Defeating Capitalism

We are very poor guardians of our own liber­ties …. [Liberalism’s] minimalist view of civic obligation [and the] dangerous privatiza­tion [of certain values of Western civili­za­tion]. [Quentin Skinner in “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty,” in Sterling M. McMurrin, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 225-50.]

 

 

Hobbes and liberal capitalism:

“[The purpose of a public sphere is] merely to facilitate private interaction.  This is a move of immense ideological significance because it provides for the germination of the liberal notion that the state … is  fundamentally undesirable, an illegitimate intruder except where its actions facilitate private interaction.” “[Moreover Hobbes’s] negative libertarianism survived and achieved the preeminent status it did in the dominant ideology because of its affinity with these emerging economic and social relations” [Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 60 and 63.].

 

Hobbes conception of goodness:

But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good: and the object of his hate and aversion, evil ….For these words of good and evil … are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil …. [Leviathan, Chapter 6, “Good”; Collier, p. 48]

 

On private property:

As a presidential candidate, [Colonel Jacobo] Arbenz had gone so far as to suggest that some of the land [42% of which in Guatemala was owned by the United Fruit Company] might be sold back to the Guatemalan people at the price per acre established by the United Fruit Company’s own tax lawyers.  In Washington the suggestion was received as an insult tantamount to a declaration of war.  The Americans were willing to put up with almost anything, but not with the blasphemy of land reform.  Land reform called into doubt the American belief in the sacred nature of private property.   Private property was what democracy was all about, as fundamental to the orderly workings of the universe as the corn harvest or the rain.  [Lewis H. Lapham, “Quetzal,” Harper’s Magazine, Feb. 1989, p. 9]

 

Conservatism:

…Men have no right to risk the very existence of their nation and their civilization upon experiments in morals and politics; for each man’s private capital of intelligence is petty; it is only when a man draws upon the bank and capital of the ages, the wisdom of our ancestors, that he can act wisely. [Edmund Burke, quoted in Kenneth M. Dolbeare, Directions of American Political Thought (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1969), p. 11).]

 

Edmund Burke proposed:     

“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank of nations and of ages.” Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), p. 76.

 

On Science and Free will:

There exists within the cranium a whole world of diverse causal forces, as in no other cubic half-foot of universe that we know…. [and] if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those overall organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patters overall cerebral excita­tion that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity….

 

[T]he kind of determinism proposed is not that of the atomic, molecu­lar, or cellular level, but rather the kind that prevails at the level of cerebral mentation, involving the interplay of ideas, reasoning processes, judgments, emotion, insight, and so forth. [Roger W. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority (Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 33-34, 39]

 

Communist Tactics:

Only one thing is needed to enable us to march forward more surely and more firmly to victory: namely, the full and complete thought of our appreciation by all communists in all countries of the necessity of displaying the utmost flexibility in their tactics.  The strictest loyalty to the ideas of communism must be combined with the ability to make all the necessary practical compromises, to attack, to make agreements, zigzags, retreats, etc. [Lenin, “Left Wing Communism,” 1920].

War between Communism and Capitalism:

War to the hilt between communism and capitalism is inevitable, Today, of course, we are not strong enough to attack.  Our time will come in 30 to 40 years.  To win, we shall need the element of surprise.  The western world will have to be put to sleep.  So we shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record.  There shall be electrifying overtures and unheard of concessions.  The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends.  As soon as their guard is down, we shall smash them with our clenched fist.  [Dimitry Manuilski, Lenin School of Political Warfare, Moscow, 1930, Quoted in W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist, from a letter by Joseph Z. Kornfeder to Dr. J. D. Bales.]

 

Austrian Subjective Values by Don Bellante:

The Austrian approach is most distinct from mainstream econom­ics in its thorough emphasis on the individual decision maker as the focus of scientific analysis.  Yet with the values and motives of individuals being entirely subjective it is impossible for an analyst to pass judgment on the optimality of the individual’s chosen actions. [“Subjective value theory & government interven­tion in the Labor Market,” Austrian Economics Newsletter, Spring/Summer 1989, pp. 1-2.]

 

On Reason:

He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave. [Sir William Drummond, Academical Questions]

 

On Liberty:

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth. [George Washington, Maxims of Washington]

 

 

 

Auguste Comte On Altruism:

“Everything we have belongs then to Humanity…Positivism never admits anything but duties, of all to all. For its social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of right, constantly based on individualism.  We are born loaded with obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries.  Later they only grow or accumulate before we can return any service. On what human foundation then could rest the idea of right, which in reason should imply some previous efficiency?  Whatever may be our efforts, the longest life well employed will never enable us to pay back but an imperceptible part of what we have received.  And yet it would only be after a complete return that we should be justly authorized to require reciprocity for the new services.  All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral.  This [“to live for others”], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.” Auguste Comte, The Catechism of Positive Religion (Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley Publ., 1973), pp. 212-30.

 

Pablo Picasso:

“I’d like to live like a poor man, only with lots of money.”

 

Michael de Montaigne

“Aristippus championed only the body, as though we had no soul, Zeno championed only the soul, as though we had no body.  Both were flawed.”

“May Philosophy’s followers, faced with breaking their wife’s hymen, be no more erect, muscular, nor succulent than her arguments are!”

“It is an error to reckon some function to be less worthy because they are necessities.  They will never beat it out of my head that the marriage of Pleasure to Necessity … is a most suitable match.”

“And the most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being.”

 

1. Somerset Maugham

“… finally science had not fulfilled the promises which the unwise expected, and, dissatisfied at not receiving answers to questions that science never pretended to answer, many threw themselves into the arms of the Church.”

“I have read much philosophy, and though I do not see how it is possible to refuse intellectual assent to certain theories of the Absolute, I can find nothing in them to induce me to depart from my instinctive disbelief in what is usually meant by the word religion.”

“I have never found that suffering improves the character.  Its influence to refine and ennoble is a myth.”

“… intuition, a subject upon which certain philosophers have reared an imposing edifice of surmise, but which seems to me to offer as insecure a foundation for any structure more substantial than a Castle in Spain as a ping-pong ball wavering on a jet of water in a shooting-gallery.”

 

Herman Hesse:

“The eye of desire dirties and distorts.  Only when we desire noth­ing, only when our gaze becomes pure contemplation, does the soul of things (which is beauty) open itself to us.  If I inspect a forest with the intention of buying it, renting it, cutting it down, going hunting in it, or mortgaging it, then I do not see the forest but only its relation to my desires, plans, and concerns, to my purse.  Then it consists of wood, it is young or old, healthy or diseased.  But if I want nothing from it but to gaze, “thoughtlessly,” into its green depths, then it becomes a forest, nature, a growing thing;  only then is it beautiful.” “Concerning the Soul,” in Herman Hesse, My Belief, Essays on Life and Art [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974], p. 37.

“The collective mankind becomes for us a representation of the soul.” p. 38

“The soul has no knowledge, no judgment, no program.  It has simply impetus, feeling, and future.  The great saints and preachers fol­lowed it, the heroes and sufferers, the great generals and conquer­ors; the great magicians and artists followed it, and all those whose way began in the commonplace and ended on the holy heights.  The way of millionaires is a different way and ends in the sanitari­um.” p. 45.

 

Hegel on Altruism

The world process was supposed to be the perversion of the good, because it took individuality for its principle…. The world process transmutes and perverts the unchangeable, but does so in fact by transforming it out of the nothingness of abstraction into the being of reality.

The course of the world is, then, victorious over what, in opposition to it, constitutes virtue; it is victorious over that which took an unreal abstraction to be the essential reality.  But it is not victorious over something real, but over the production of distinctions that are no distinctions, over this pompous talk about the best for mankind and the oppression of humanity, about sacrifice for goodness’ sake and the misuse of gifts.  Imaginary idealities and purposes of that sort fall on the ear as idle phrases, which exalt the heart and leave the reason blank, which edify but build up nothing that endures; declamations whose only definite announcement is that the individual who professes to act for such noble ends and indulges in such fine phrases holds himself for a fine creature; a swollen inflation with emptiness.  [Phenomenology, trns. Baillie, p. 409]

 

Hegel on Feelings:

Since the man of common sense appeals to his feeling, to an oracles within his breast, he is done with any one who does not agree.  He has just to explain that he has no more to say to any one who does not find and feel the same as himself.  In other words, he tramples the roots of humanity underfoot.  For the nature of humanity is to impel men to agree with one another, and its very existence lies simply in the explicit realization of a community of conscious life.  What is anti-human, the condition of mere animals, consists in keeping within the sphere of feeling pure and simple, and in being able to communicate only by way of feeling-states.[Phenomenology, p. 127]

 

Cloriss Lamont:

It is essential to recognize that freedom of choice is inextricably bound up with the human capacity for thought.  The word intelligence originates from the Latin “inter” (between) and “legere” (to choose).  Choosing means making up one’s mind.”  (“Free Choice and Naturalism: A Written Exchange,” The Humanist, May/June 1990, p. 18.)

 

Thomas W. Clark:

The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature…..The human will is simply the dynamic urge to carry out wishes and ideas that have become part of our being though the impact of the total cause-effect necessities both within us and without us. (Ibid., p. 19)

Kennan on Sexuality in humans:

There is no getting around it: we have to do here with a compulsion we share with the lowest and least attractive of the mammalian and reptile species.  It invites most hand­somely, and very often deserves, the ridicule, the furtive curiosity, and the commercial exploitation it receives.  To highly sensitive people, it can become a never-ending source of embarrassment and humiliation, of pain to its immediate victims and to others, of mis­understandings, shame, and remorse all around.  Not for nothing do the resulting tragedies dominate so much of realistic as well as of romantic literature.  Not for nothing has this urge earned the prominent place it takes in the religious rites of confession and prayers for forgiveness.

There is, in short, no escaping it: the sexual urge, the crude expression of nature’s de­mand for the proliferation of the species, enriching, confusing, and tragedizing the human predicament as it does at every turn, must be regarded as a signal imperfection in man’s equipment to lead life in the civilized context.  It cannot be expected to be otherwise at any time in the foreseeable future. (George F. Kennan, Man, The Cracked Vessel [New York: W. W. Norton, 1993], pp. 19-20.)

 

Aristotle on Self-Love:

“Therefore the good man should be a lover of self (for he will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows), but the wicked man should not.” (Nicomachean Ethics 1169a12)

 

Alasdair MacIntyre:

[T]he Marxists understanding of liberalism as ideological, as a deceiving and self-deceiving mask for certain socialo interests, remains compelling.

Liberalism in the name of freedom imposes a certain kind of unacknowledged domination, and one which in the long run tends to dissolve traditional human ties and to impoverish social and cultural relationships.  Liberalism, while imposing through state power regimes that declare everyone free to pursue whatever they take to be their own good, deprives most people of the possibility of understanding their lives as a quest for the discovery and achievement of the good, especially by the way in which it attempts to discredit those traditional forms of human community within which this project has to be embodied. (Aladair MacIntyre, “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” in Giovanna Borradori, The American Philosopher [University of Chiago Press, 1994], p. 143.)

 

Maclagan on Altruism:

“‘Altruism’ [is] assuming a duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our fellows….Altruism is to … maintain quite simply that a man may and should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness as such when he is deciding what course of action to pursue.” (pp. 109-110).  [As presented ordinarily, by ministers, priests, philosophers or in fiction, altruism means ranking looking out for others first in one’s list of moral duties.]  W. G. Maclagan, “Self and Others: A Defense of Altruism,” Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1954): 109-127.

 

Stephen Hawking on Free Will & Determinism

… the doctrine of diminished responsibility: the idea that a person should not be punished for their actions because they were under stress.  It may be that someone is more likely to commit an antisocial act when under stress.  But that does not mean that we should make it even more likely that he or she commit the act by reducing the punishment. [Black Holes and Baby Universes and other essays, New York: Bantam Books, 1993, pp. 123-4]

In summary, the title of this essay was a question: is everything determined?  The answer is yes, it is.  But it might as well not be, because we can never know what is determined. [ibid., p. 126]

 

William Pitt (younger) on “necessity”

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.  It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.  [Speech on the India Bill, Nov. 1783]

“A cheap pawnbroker or a multimillionaire businessman … they are both blood suckers.”

Fernando Ray’s character in Luis Bunuel’s film, Tristana (1970)

“There’s never been a problem yet I couldn’t solve by thinking.  I just don’t usually choose to think.”  Tim Sandlin, Sex and Sunsets, p. 255.

 

“‘O Cormac, grandson of Conn,’ said Carbery,

‘what is the sweetest thing you have heard?’

‘Not hard to tell,’ said Cormac.

‘The shout of triumph after victory,

Praise after wages,

A lady’s invitation to her pillow.’ [from THE INSTRUCTIONS OF KING CORMAC, early 9th century]

 

On Judgment:

“Judgment is something that is entirely yours; it is an element in personal commitment in an extremely pure state. Because it is so personal, so much an expression of one’s own reasonableness apart from any constraint, because all alternatives are provided for, it is entirely one’s own responsibility. Because it is entirely one’s own responsibility, one does not complain about one’s bad judgments; one is responsible for them.” Bernard J. F. Lonegran, Understanding and Being, Edwin Mellen Press, 1980, p.113; cf. p, 124]

 

Dick Francis on Loners

….In Britain the word “loner” flew none of the danger signals it did over in the United States, where the desirability of being “one of a team” was indoctrinated from preschool.  “Loners” here, I’d discovered, were people who went off their heads….[To the Hilt, p. 22]

 

 

 

Dick Francis on legislation:

Patsy was right, of course, but predictably (like most legislation) she achieved the opposite result of that intended…[To the Hilt, p. 249]

 

Fareed Zakaria on democracy:

“Democracy without constitutional liberalism is not simply inadequate, but dangerous, bringing with it the erosion of liberty, the abuse of power, ethnic divisions, and even war.  Eighty years ago, Woodrow Wilson took America into the twentieth century with a challenge, to make the world safe for democracy.  As we approach the next century, our task is to make democracy safe for the world.” [“The Rise of Illiberal Democracy” Foreign Affairs, Fall 1997]

 

Tibor Machan on Existence:

Things — whatever — can exist pretty adequately without having to exist necessarily; nor is our inability to prove their necessary existence any kind of liability, unless we are dealing with things — whatever — for which necessary existence or necessity is an (ontological) requirement (say the laws of logic). [Tibor Machan, 11/18/97]

 

Susan Wolf on Moral Sainthood:

By moral saint I mean a person whose every action is as morally good as possible, a person, that is, who is as morally worthy as can be….A necessary condition of moral sainthood would be that one’s life be dominated by a commitment to improving the welfare of others or of society was a whole. [Quoted in Robin Wang, “The Principle of Humanity: An Alternative Perspective on Contemporary Moral Issues.”]

 

William Greider on the Anti-capitalism of novelists:

The heavy novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy and others [consider Cather, Fitzgerald, and their contemporaries] told, over and over in different story forms, the same moral tragedy: innocent Americans who left their simple country past for the dangerous excitement of the city, where they were ensnared by a brutal new system of economic organization, forced to cooperate with it, robbed of their native virtue.  Novelists in America have never reconciled themselves to the terms of the modern economic system. They remain hostile to it and pessimistic, mocking the values of corporate bureaucracy, lamenting the soul-deadening materialism. Instead, literature and popular culture continue to celebrate what seems lost the free ranging individualism … the idyll of self-reliance. [William Greider, Secret of the Temple: How The Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Touchstone, 1987).]

 

Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of power.  It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.  There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern.  They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. [Daniel Webster, quoted in Hearings on the confirmation of Abe Fortas to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, p. 108]

 

You should never trust experts.  If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.  They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.[ Lord Salisbury]

 

Adam Smith about collusion:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.  It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice.  But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies;  much less to render them necessary.” Wealth of Nations, p. 144 – 1976 edition

 

Thomas Reid on arguing for the obvious:

[W]hen we attempt to prove by direct argument, what is really self-evident, the reasoning will always be inconclusive; for it will either take for granted the thing to be proved, or something not more evident; and so, instead of giving strength to the conclusion, will rather tempt those to doubt of it, who never did so before. [Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind]

 

William Graham Sumner on Morality:

All notions of propriety, decency, chastity, politeness, order, duty, right, rights, discipline, respect, reverence, cooperation, and fellowship, especially all things in regard to which good and ill depend entirely on the point at which the line is drawn, are in the mores.  The mores can make things seem right and good to one group or one age which to another seem antagonistic to every instinct of human nature….[Folkways, NY: Ginn and Company, 1907, “Cultural Relativism,” p. 55]

 

Aristotle Distorted:

“[The Apple] is a patent attempt to first circumcise and then baptize Aristotle, that is to make him acceptable to Moslem and Hebrew thinkers and then to Christians.  This task is attempted by having him repudiate his teachings on the eternity of the world and the mortality of the human soul….” (“Preface,” The Apple or Aristotle’s Death, translated from the Latin with an Introduction by Mary F. Rousseau, [Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1968], p. 3)

 

“While the ideas of the ancients were, to varying degrees, distorted by this process [of ancient ideas entering Europe], and while their acceptance did decline rapidly after the peak of scholasticism in the thirteenth century, still, many of them have persisted and become a permanent and indispensable part of our intellectual heritage.  One such idea¾the wise man’s contempt for the world¾is a basic them of The Apple.” (p. 3)

 

God & Goodness:

“If in ascribing goodness to God I do not mean what I mean by goodness, if I do not mean the goodness of which I have some knowledge, but an incomprehensible attribute of an incomprehensible substance, which for aught I know may be a totally different quality from that which I love and venerate…what do I mean by calling it goodness? and what reason have I for venerating it?  If I know nothing about what the attribute is, I cannot tell that it is a proper object of veneration.  To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good? To assert in words what we do not think in meaning, is as suitable a definition as can be given of a moral falsehood.” (Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy; quoted in  J. Hospers, Introd. to Philosophical Analysis, along with extended discussion of evil and omnipotence, etc.)

 

Peter McWilliams on advocating consensualism:

One of the fears about discussing consensual activities is that if you defend a certain practice, you’re often accused of being or doing that. Well, if you’re wondering about me, why not assume that I do it all? Yes, just presume that I am a drug-selling homosexual prostitute gambler who drunkenly loiters all day with my six wives and four husbands, making and watching pornography while being treated by strange medical practices and running a cult on the side.

You can also assume my motives to be the darkest, most selfish, and pernicious you can imagine. No matter how many times I say that I’m not advocating any of the consensual crimes, someone will, of course, accuse me of ‘recruiting’ for them all.

It’s a classic example of projection: the religions that believe most in vigorous proselytizing are the same ones that accuse others of recruiting. What they call ‘witnessing’ and ‘testifying’ – hence        God’s work – becomes ‘recruitment’ and ‘brainwashing’ when used by others, hence the work of the devil. From (Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do [1993, p.17])

 

Locke On Choosing to Think:

“[T]hough we cannot hinder our knowledge where the agreement is once perceived, nor our assent, where the probability manifestly appears upon due consideration of all the measures of it; yet we can hinder both knowledge and assent, by stopping our inquiry, and not employing our faculties in the search of any truth.  If it were not so, ignorance, error, or infidelity, could not in any case be a fault.” John Locke, Essay in Human Understanding, Book, IV, xx, 16.

 

The RC Message:

“[The priest] was speaking so slowly and with such passion that, although I know little French, I understood half of what he said and the purport of all of it, which was simply that because Christ loved us enough to die for us, we must follow his example and love one another, for therein lies our salvation.” (Anthony Brandt, “Rome,” Sky, July 1998, p. 39)

 

1. A. Hayek on morals:

“That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values–indeed not merely one value among many but the source of all values–is almost self-evident.  It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values, to contribute to their further growth, and to earn moral merit.” In F. A. Hayek, “The Moral Element in Free Enterprise,” Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), pp. 230.

 

“It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values, to contribute to their further growth, and to earn moral credit.  Obedience has moral value only where it is a matter of choice and not of coercion.” (ibid)

 

“It would be impossible to assert that a free society will always and necessarily develop values of which we would approve, or even…that it will maintain values which are compatible with the preservation of freedom.” (ibid)

 

Tibor Machan on Blaming:

Blaming is a kind of (morally focused) factual ascription of responsibility of untoward deeds that have been volitionally undertaken.

 

Santayana on Uniformity as an Ideal:

“There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.”

George Santayana, from The Life of Reason (NY: Scribners, 1905-06), vol. 2, p. 90.

 

Rothbard on Nuclear Weapons:

“…while the bow and arrow, and even the rifle, can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even ‘conventional’ aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.

“This is why the old cliché no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace. For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner. Therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake. Indeed, of all the aspects of liberty, such disarmament becomes the highest political good that can be pursued in the modern world. For just as murder is a more heinous crime against another man than larceny, so mass murder–indeed murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival itself–is the worst crime that any man could possibly commit. And that crime is now all too possible. Or are libertarians going to wax properly indignant about price controls or the income tax, and yet shrug their shoulders at or even positively advocate the ultimate crime of mass murder?

“If nuclear warfare is totally illegitimate even for individuals defending themselves against criminal assault, how much more so is nuclear or even ‘conventional’ warfare between States!” Murray N. Rothbard, THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY (NY: New York University Press, 1998 [1982]), pp. 190-91.

Weinberg on Determinism:

“The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather….I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.”  Steven Weinberg, “A Designer Universe?” the New York Review of Books, VolXLVI, No. 16 (October 21, 1999), p.46.

 

Thomas Nagel on the way of Ideas:

“…political philosophy, when it has an impact on the world, affects the world only indirectly, through the gradual penetration, usually over generations, of questions and arguments from abstruse theoretical writings into the consciousness and the habits of thought of educated persons, and from there into political and legal arguments and eventually into the structure of alternatives among which political and practical choices are actually made.” (Thomas Nagel, “Justice, Justice, Shalt Thou Pursue, The rigorous compassion of John Rawls” The New Republic (October 25, 1999), pp. 36-37.

 

Joseph on Cause:

…the earth is not more antecedent than consequent in time to the movement of a pendulum which it attracts; and oxygen and hydrogen are ingredients necessary to the formation of water, but they do not happen like their combination.  Cause no doubt implies change and succession.  But there can be no change without something which changes, i .e., which persists through a succession of states. (H. W. B. Joseph in his An Introduction to Logic (Oxford University Press, 1906, p. 405.)

 

Silvan Tomkins on infantile experience:

We are indebted to Freud for the rediscovery of our infantile experience. . . . he exaggerated the “infantile” characteristics of this early experience. Freud the moralist was not prepared to tolerate in adults _//- either the early self-love or the early dependence on the oceanic union with the mother. These earlier modes, claustral and pre-verbal, are we think important components of all human experience, early and late. To insist as Freud did on the necessity of their later transformation and subordination to adult modes of communion is to impoverish the personality of the adult and to interpret reality in accordance with the heart’s desire when it is the heart of an over-individuated and somewhat alienated human being. it is not unlike the disdain of a gourmet for the simple palate of the infant, his live of milk to relieve his thirst and hunger pangs. The simple oral pleasures of the young are never outgrown, though they may be masked and overgrown. The human animal will always be capable of intense satisfaction from water or milk when thirst or hunger mounts. Nor is the satisfaction of the adult inherently different than that of the infant in this respect. What distinguishes early and later taste are the later transformations and discriminations of the more learned palate of the adult. But these do not require us to subordinate the early pleasures to the late in adult orality nor require that we reject these early pleasures either as perverse or infantile. They are rather the simple pleasures of both the young and the old. So it is also with the affect of enjoyment.

[from Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds. With a biographical sketch by Irving E. Alexander. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 89-90.  The symbol “_//-” marks the page break.]

 

Spencer on Poverty:

Sympathy with one in suffering suppresses, for the time being, remembrance of his transgressions….Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclamations in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged; and non of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their own misdeeds.(Man versus the State, p.22)

 

Rorty on ethics:

Non-metaphysicians [of whom Rorty and, by his account, all other wise men are members] cannot say that democratic institutions reflect a moral reality and that tyrannical regimes do not reflect one, that tyrannies get something wrong that democratic societies get right. (Richard Rorty, “The Seer of Prague,” The New Republic, July 1, 1991, pp. 35-40.)

 

Nussbaum on Libertarianism:

“A simple ‘get the state off our backs’ position may look attractive when we are thinking about the sexlives of middle-class men, but it is clearly inadequate to deal with the situation of women and other vulnerable groups.  There is no consent where there is pervasive intimidation and hierarchy.” Martha C. Nussbaum, “Experiments in Living (Review of Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal),” The New Republic, January 3, 2000, p. 33.

 

Aquinas on Free Will:

“[M]an acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. And forasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have a free-will.” (Summa Theologica, Q. 93.)

 

Adam Smith on Market Motivation:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We Address ourselves, not to their humanity but of their advantages.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Liberty Classics, page 26-27.

 

Tibor Machan on the “blow up fallacy”:

[This] consists, first, in making diligent inquiries into some aspect of reality and arriving at significant, often true, and, at times, startling conclusions, including principles by which we can best understand what happens in the area being studied. But then an entirely unjustified turn is taken. The conclusions and principles are lifted out of the special field and imported into some other area. The picture taken in the special domain is blown up with the intent to offer us an understanding of much more, and sometimes all, of reality. The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (Arlington House, 1974), p. 52)

 

Rights as Powers:

“If one comes to believe with Bentham that a right without the power adequate to its exercise is really a nonentity, a mere philosophical fiction, it is but a short step to believe that ‘adequate power’ is the real ground of right in society and to contend that the advancement of rights is at bottom the pretension of those who have or who seek the resources to promote their own interests and to prevail over others.”  William Augustus Banner, Moral Norms and Moral Order (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 1981), p. 98.

I can indeed be constrained by others to perform actions that are directed as a means to an end, but I can never be constrained by others to have an end; only I myself can make something my end. (Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans., M. Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p.381.)

 

Tibor Machan on Prudence:

I have been saying that the moral virtue of prudence, understood roughly along Aristotelian lines, gives moral backing to the activities involved in commerce and business.  By “prudence” I have in mind “practical wisdom,” which Aristotle says “must be a reasoned and true capacity to act with regard to human goods.”  But I also argue that the content of practical wisdom will depend in part on what human goods are, which in turn will depend on human nature.  If we understand human beings to be not only rational beings but rational animals, and  if we understand their nature to be our guide, not only their distinctive essence (rationality), then practical wisdom will have to attend to human economic and related concerns.  This is because our animality will be significantly determinate of the human goods we ought to act with regard to.  And if you add to this the element of individuality that is also defining of our human nature, the human goods in question will be, first and foremost, the goods of the human agent in question (understood, of course, broadly).

 

Xenophon on Morality and Freedom:

“Everything” said Pericles, “which one man obliges another to do without gaining his consent, whether he enact it in writing or not, seems to me to be force rather than law.” Xenophon, Memora­bilia, 46, from Aeon Skoble and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Political Philosophy, Essential Selections (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 3-4.

 

Religion and Liberty:

Man cannot be forced to accept the truth. He can be drawn toward the truth only by his own nature, that is, by his own freedom . . . This has always been the teaching of the Church. Crossing the Threshold of Hope, John Paul II, (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 190

 

Thucydides on the commons:

[T]hey devote a very small fraction of the time to the consideration of any public object, most of it to the prosecution of their own objects.  Meanwhile, each fancies that no harm will come to his neglect, that it is the business of somebody else to look after this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately, the common cause imperceptibly decays. (Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, bk. I, sec. 141).

 

From individual property rights (including rights to one’s own body and the fruits of one’s labor) these early modern thinkers derived lessons about consent, governmental accountability, and resistance to abuses of power. Cary J. Nederman. “Political Theory and Subjective Rights in 14th Century England,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 58 (Spring 1996), p. 327.

 

Von Mises on Liberalism:

No sect and no political party has believed that it could afford to forgo advancing its cause by appealing to men’s senses. Rhetorical bombast, music and song resound, banners wave, flowers and colors serve as symbols, and the leaders seek to attach their followers to their own person. Liberalism has nothing to do with all this. It has no party flower and no party color, no party song and no party idols, no symbols and no slogans. It has the substance and the arguments. These must lead it to victory. (Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism German edition, 1927; latest English edition Copyright 1985 The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington, NY. Translation by Ralph Raico. Online edition Copyright The Mises Institute, 2000)

 

Charles Baudelaire on Commerce:

Commerce is satanic, because it is the basest and vilest form of egoism.

The spirit of every business-man is completely depraved.

Commerce is natural, therefore shameful.

The Intimate Journals, trns. Christophere Isherwood (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). P. 51.

 

Ross & van den Haag on Free Will and Morality:

Even if science cannot pronounce on the sub­ject of moral conduct, it would seem to he rele­vant to a factual matter: Is man really free to choose? If science can answer that question, it can show whether moral conduct is possible at all. For unless men are free to choose between alternatives, they are not moral agents. Only if man is free to choose does he fulfill the necessary condition for the existence of morals. And if he is not free to choose, there can he no morals. (Ralph Ross and Ernest van den Haag, The Fabric of Society [Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1957], pp. 286.)

 

Roger Trigg on Realism & Objectivity:

“It is a paradox that man can demand the centre of the stage, insisting that everything should depend on him, and yet in the end find that in doing so he has lost his rationality and freedom.  Realism takes the possibility of error and ignorance seriously, but it also gives men the chance of notable success in extending the range of their understanding.  It gives them something to reason about, while acknowledging that they are free to make mistakes.” (Reality at Risk, p. 197)

“Without objective reality, we can say nothing true, and without the possibility of truth and error, there can be no possibility of rational judgment. Without rationality, men can have no freedom of choice.” (Ibid., p. 197)

 

Plato on self-interest:

Crito, “When you are gone, Socrates, how can we best act to please you?”  Socrates: “Just follow my old recipe, my friend: do yourselves concern yourselves with your own true self-interest; then you will oblige me, and mine and yourself too.”

 

Albert Einstein on Ethics:

The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil from the spirit of man.

 

Luck:

Chance favors the prepared.

Louis Pasteur

 

Blaise Pascal on Thinking:

“Let us labour, then, to think well, for such is the foundation of morality.” Quoted in THE WEEK, July 27, 2002, p. 17.

 

Wittgenstein on being better and having a better mind:

“I am working diligently and wish I were better and had a better mind. And these both are  one and the same….” Engelmann, P., Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir. B.F. McGuinness (ed.) (Oxford 1967), S.4. [my own translation, TRM]

 

Tibor Machan on the human mind:

“While the human mind has the remarkable capacity to be creative and inventive, it goes hand in hand with the equal capacity to produce BS to justify all kinds of rotten impulses.”

 

Mencius on the role of thinking:

‘Though equally human, why are some men guided one way and others guided another way?’ ‘The organs of hearing and sight are unable to think and can be misled by external things.  When one thing acts on another, all it does is attract it.  The organ of the heart [= mind] can think.  But it will find the answer only if it does think; otherwise it will not find the answer.’ — Mencius (4th-century BC Confucian)

 

Greer Garson on Rights:

“Why should I hate you?  You have a right to your luck, to your life.” In Desire Me (1947)

 

Parker Thomas Moon in Individualism:

Language often obscures truth.  More than is ordinarily realized, our eyes are blinded to the facts of international relations by tricks of the tongue.  When one uses the simple monosyllable “France” one thinks of France as a unit, an entity.  When to avoid awkward repetition we use a personal pronoun in referring to a country–when for example we say “France sent her troops to conquer Tunis”–we impute not only unity but personality to the country.  The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and-blood men and women who are the true actors.  How different it would be if we had no such word as “France,” and had to say instead–thirty-eight million men, women and children of very diversified interests and beliefs, inhabiting 218,000 square miles of territory!  Then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: “A few of these thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis.”  This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions.  Who are the “few”?  Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis?  And why did these obey?

Empire-building is done not by “nations” but by men.  The problem before us is to discover the men, the active, interested minorities in each nation, who are directly interested in imperialism, and then to analyze the reasons why the majorities pay the expenses and fight the wars necessitated by imperialist expansion.  (Parker Thomas Moon, Imperialism and World Politics [New York: The MacMillan Company, 1930], p. 58

 

Murdoch on Meta-Ethics:

“… I would suggest that at the level of serious common sense and of an ordinary non-philosophical reflection about the nature of morals it is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one’s eyes but of a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline.

“The place of choice is certainly a different one [from that of the existentialists] if we think in terms of a world which is compulsively present to the will, and the discernment and exploration of which is a slow business.  Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the `decision’ lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be `cultivated’.  If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is ultimate condition to be aimed at.

“Will and reason then are not entirely separate faculties in the moral agent. Will continually influences belief, for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality.”  (The Sovereignty of the Good, pp38-40)

 

John Acton on liberty:

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare…

In every age [liberty’s] progress has been beset by its natural enemies: by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food.

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

Liberty is the prevention of control by others.  This requires self-control…

Liberty alone demands, for its realization, the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.

Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together.  Liberty is not a means to a higher political end.  It is itself the highest political end.  It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.

Liberty enables us to do our duty unhindered by the state, by society, by ignorance and error.  We are free in proportion as we are safe from these impediments…

…obscure ethics imply imperfect liberty.  For liberty comes not with any ethical system, but with a very developed one.

…sanctifying freedom…teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.

…by birth all men are free.

…conscience imperatively demands a corresponding measure of personal liberty…With this no human authority can be permitted to interfere.  We are bound to extend to the utmost, and to guard from every encroachment, the sphere in which we can act in obedience to the sole voice of conscience, regardless of any other consideration.

…the interest of individuals is above the exclusive interest of the state. The power of the whole is not to be set in the balance for a moment with freedom-that is, the conscience of the subject-and those who act on other principle are the worst of criminals.

It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people to govern others.  Every man is the best, the most responsible, judge of his own advantage.

The great question is to discover, not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the conscience of mankind.

The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom.

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern.  Every class is unfit to govern.

Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.

Laws are made for the public good…The public good is not to be considered, if it is purchased at the expense of an individual.

The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust.

There are many things the government can’t do, many good purposes it must renounce.  It must leave them to the enterprise of others.  It cannot feed the people.  It cannot enrich the people.  It cannot teach the people.

Popular power may be tainted with the same poison as personal power.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather if that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.

Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.

…the possession of unlimited power…corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding…

There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders…

There are principles which override precedents…there is such a thing as a higher law.

…all legislation must conform [under a law of nature]…by the voice of universal reason…a principle embracing all mankind… A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved.

 

1. H. Auden on altruism:

We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.

(THE WEEK, Nov. 16, 2002, p. 19)

 

John Philpot Curran and Wendell Phillips:

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  (Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), abolitionist, orator and columnist for The Liberator, paraphrasing John Philpot Curran (above) in a speech before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society in 1852, according to The Dictionary of Quotations edited by Bergen Evans.)

 

Hazlitt on the Justice of Liberty:

The superior freedom of the capitalist system, its superior justice, and its superior productivity are not three superiorities, but one.   The justice follows from the freedom and the productivity follows from the freedom and the justice. [Henry Hazlitt quoted in The Free­man, June 1993, p. 225].

 

Not “Our” values:

Many times in the last year we have heard: “Our values are under threat.” They are; and we should–we must–defend them.  But not because they are ours; for that really would be a regression to the dark side of human nature.  If we take this thought to heart, we shall not, as we should not, fear that in defending them we may be guilty of a kind of cultural imperialism.  And we will appreciate that, in the deepest sense, the values at stake are not “ours”–not peculiarly American, English, French, or even Western, but human: values, that is, with the capacity to enhance human flourishing, and to appeal emotionally to human everywhere. [Professor Susan Haack (U. of Miami), “9/11/02,” Free Inquiry, Winter 2002/03, p. 12.]

 

Jesus on Trade:

Then he entered the temple area and began driving out those who were selling.  “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be a house of prayer’; but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’” Bible, Luke 19:45.

 

Nietzsche on Disciples:

“The first generation of disciples to any new philosophy is not a sufficient refutation of that philosophy” (attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche).

 

Maugham on Freedom:

“If a nation or an individual values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too.” –W. Somerset Maugham

 

Milton Friedman on morality:

“The liberal conceives of men as imperfect beings.  He regards the problem of social organization to be as much a negative problem of preventing ‘bad’ people from doing harm as of enabling ‘good’ people to do good; and, of course, ‘bad’ and ‘good’ people may be the same people, depending on who is judging them.” (Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, p.12)

 

Friedman on Sin:

“I think that the crucial question that anybody who believes in freedom has to ask himself is whether to let another man be free to sin.  If you really know what sin is, if you could be absolutely certain that you had the revealed truth, then you could not let another man sin.  You have to stop him.” “Interview with Milton Friedman,” Reason, December 1974, p. 5.

 

Rawls on Self-interest & Friendship:

“Among persons who never acted in accordance with their duty of justice except as reasons of self-interest and expediency dictated there would be no bonds of friendship and mutual trust.” (TOJ, p. 488)

 

Anonymous on Democracy:

“When democracy goes against you, it’s a conspiracy; when it favors you, it’s the will of the people.”

 

Josephson on business ethics:

There’s no such thing as business ethics; there’s just ethics. And ethics makes no concessions for the real or imagined necessities of making a profit.  (Michael S. Josephson, Founder and CEO, Josephson Institute of Ethics)

 

Spiritualism in Bible:

If you have been raised by Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are in earth.  (Colossians 3:1-4.)

 

 

 

 

Alan Furst on the world:

“I had a friend, a Russian, he had theories about these things–a world of bad people and good people, a war that never seems to end, you have to take sides.  I don’t know, maybe that’s the way it is.”  Cpt. De Milja, The Polish Officer, by Alan Furst (p. 286)

 

Aquinas on Free Will:

[M]an acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. And forasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have a free-will.” (Summa Theologica, Q. 93.)

 

Montaigne on Misanthropy:

Of all our diseases, the worst is to despise our own being

 

Diogenes Laertius reporting on Diogenes , the Cynic:

Once he saw the officials of a temple leading away some one who had stolen

a bowl belonging to the treasurers, and said, ‘The great thieves are leading

away the little thief.’

 

Tibor Machan on gaining from bad institutions:

Getting benefits from a bad practice or institution is only wrong

if one supports it and isn’t willing to give it up once it is abolished.

From “Trying to Silence the Rebels Within”.

http://www.cato.org/dailys/04-02-02.html

 

1. S. Caldwell on Government:

The point to remember is that what Government gives it must first take away.

 

George Orwell on Autobiographies:

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.  George Orwell, quoted in The [London] Sunday Times [from THE WEEK, Sept. 13, 2003, p. 17]

 

Barnett on the Constitution:

A constitution is legitimate and binding in conscience to the extent that it protects the natural rights of those under its jurisdiction. “[Randy] Barnett: Restoring the Constitution,” Cato Policy Report, March/April 2004, p. 3.

 

Susan Sontag on Communism:

I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should have understood a very long time ago: that Communism is fascism–successful fascism, if you will. What we have called fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown–that has, largely, failed. I repeat: not only is fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies–especially when their populations are moved to revolt–but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face. (“Communism and the Left” The Nation, 2-27-1982)

 

William Chillingworth On skepticism:

No man’s error can be confuted who doth not . . . grant some true principle that contradicts his error.

 

St. Augustine on happiness:

No man is happy except through the highest good, which is to be found and included in that truth which we call wisdom.  (On Free Choice of the Will [Library of Liberal Arts, 1964].)

 

Roth on tribalism:

…One Sunday, a Sunday probably much like today, the two Gestapo officers went out drinking together and they got drunk, much the way, thanks to your hospitality, we are getting nicely drunk here. They had an argument. They were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist’s house and got the dentist out of bad and shot him. This enraged the other Nazi so much that the next morning he came to our house and he shot my father, and my brother also, who was eight. When he was taken before the German commandant, my father’s murderer explained, ‘He shot my Jew, so I shot his.’ ‘But why did you shoot the child?’ ‘That’s how God-damn angry I was, sir.’ They were reprimanded and told not to do it again. That was all…. (From Philip Roth, The Prague Orgy [Vintage, 1985], pp. 19-20.)

 

Adam Smith & Invisible Hand:

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it. (The Wealth of Nations, B.IV, Ch.2, “Of Restraints upon the Importation from Foreign Countries,” in paragraph IV.2.9)

 

Sam Adams on rights:

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can. Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists, The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772 Old South Leaflets no. 173 (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, 1906) 7: 417.

 

Dr. Jonhson on stockbrokers:

A stockbroker is “a low wretch who gets money by buying and selling shares.” From Henry Hitchings, Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (London: John Murray).

 

Ayn Rand on the Mind-Body Problem:

Man is “an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness” (Rand, For the New Intellectual, 1961, p.142).

 

Theodore Schick on borderlines:

The point at which day turns into night or a hirsute person becomes bald cannot be precisely specified. But the distinctions between night and day or baldness and hirsuteness are as objective as they come. There are certainly borderline cases that reasonable people can disagree about, but there are also clear-cut cases where disagreement would be irrational. (Theodore Schick, “Let me Explain…” Philosophers’ Magazine, Issue 31, 3rd Quarter [2005], p. 59.)

 

On Democracy:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. (Attributed to Sir Alex Fraser Tytler [1742-1813] Lord Woodhouselee, Scottish jurist, professor and historian, supposedly from The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic, c.1799 but no book has been found.)

 

Ludwig von Mises on Creeping Socialism:

But if the trend of this policy will not change, the final result will only in accidental and negligible points differ from what happened in the England of Attlee and in the Germany of Hitler. The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments. Many people object. They stress the fact that most of the laws which aim at planning or at expropriation by means of progressive taxation have left some loopholes which offer to private enterprise a margin within which it can go on. That such loopholes still exist and that thanks to them this country is still a free country is certainly true. But this loopholes capitalism is not a lasting system. It is a respite. Powerful forces are at work to close these loopholes. From day to day the field in which private enterprise is free to operate is narrowed down. Of course, this outcome is not inevitable. The trend can be reversed as was the case with many other trends in history. … What we need is neither anti-socialism nor anti-communism but an open positive endorsement of that system to which we owe all the wealth that distinguishes our age from the comparatively straitened conditions of ages gone by. (Commercial and Financial Chronicle, May 4, 1950; also in Planning for Freedom and Other Essays and Addresses [South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1952].)

Galbraith on modern conservatives:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

 http://www.quoteworld.org/quotes/5170

 

John Locke on Delegated Powers:

First, It is not, nor can possibly be absolutely arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of the people: for it being but the joint power of every member of the society given up to that person, or assembly, which is legislator; it can be no more than those persons had in a state of nature before they entered into society, and gave up to the community: for no body can transfer to another more power than he has in himself; and no body has an absolute arbitrary power over himself, or over any other, to destroy his own life, or take away the life or property of another. A man, as has been proved, cannot subject himself to the arbitrary power of another; and having in the state of nature no arbitrary power over the life, liberty, or possession of another, but only so much as the law of nature gave him for the preservation of himself, and the rest of mankind; this is all he doth, or can give up to the common-wealth, and by it to the legislative power, so that the legislative can have no more than this. Their power, in the utmost bounds of it, is limited to the public good of the society. It is a power, that hath no other end but preservation, and therefore can never* have a right to destroy, enslave, or designedly to impoverish the subjects….(John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [Everyman, 1993], p. 182)

 

James Madison on Consent and Majority Rule:

“The first supposition is, that each individual, being previously independent of the others, the compact which is to make them one society must result from the free consent of every individual.

“But as the objects in view could not be attained, if every measure conducive to them required the consent of every member of society, the theory further supposes, either than it was part of the original compact, that the will of the majority was to be deemed the will of the whole, or that this was a law of nature, resulting from the nature of political society itself, the offspring of the natural wants of man.

“Whatever the hypothesis of the origin of the lex majoris partis, it is evident that it operates as a plenary substitute for the will of the whole society; and that the sovereignty of the society as vested in and exercisable by the majority, may do anything that could be rightfully done by the unanimous consent of the members; the reserved rights of individuals (or conscience for example) in becoming parties to the original compact being beyond the legitimate reach of sovereignty, wherever or however viewed.” James Madison, http://www.founding.com/guide/evidence/ge193.htm

“[t]here is no maxim … more liable to be misapplied … than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. Taking the word “interest” as synonymous with “ultimate happiness,” in which sense it is qualified with every necessary moral ingredient, the proposition is no doubt true. But taking it in the popular sense, as referring to immediate augmentation of property and wealth, nothing can be more false. In the latter sense, it would be the interest of the majority in every community to despoil and enslave the minority of individuals …. In fact, it is only re-establishing, under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure of right.” (Letter from James Madison to James Monroe (Oct. 5, 1786), in THE COMPLETE MADISON 45 (Saul K. Padover ed., 1953).

 

Shakespeare’s Shylock:

You take my house when you do take the prop

That doth sustain my house; you take my life

When you do take the means whereby I live.

 

Michael Ledeen on US and War:

Ken Adelman, a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, hoped that the conquest of Baghdad “emboldens leaders to drastic, not measured, approaches,” but it was left to Michael Ledeen, resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, to place the great victory in its clearest perspective. “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” (Quoted in Lewis Lapham, “The demonstration effect,” Harper’s Magazine June 2003.)

 

Leo Strauss on Standards:

If there is no standard higher than the ideal of our society, we are utterly unable to take a critical distance from that idea. But the mere fact that we can raise the question of the worth of the idea of our society shows that there is something in man that is not altogether in slavery to his society, and therefore that we are able, and hence obliged, to look for a standard with reference to which we can judge the ideals of our own as well as of any other society. That standard cannot be found in the needs of the various societies, for the societies and their parts have many needs that conflict with one another; the problem of priorities arises. This problem cannot be solved in a rational manner if we do not have a standard with reference to which we can distinguish between genuine needs and fancied needs and discern the hierarchy of the various types of genuine needs. The problem posed by the conflicting needs of society cannot be solved if we do not possess knowledge of natural right. [Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 3]

 

1. I. Lewis on Principles:

Whether a laissez-faire economy or state capitalism, or something in between, represents the ideal of social justice is not determined by any a priori principle of justice; and individual adherence to one or another such ideal must depend upon the empirically determined consequences of that manner of organizing the social economy which is in question, and upon the relative value assigned to such consequences—for example, the relative value of the larger freedom of individual initiative and, possibly, the greater productivity under private enterprise, as against the greater security of individuals and, perhaps, the gain in distributing goods more nearly according to need under socialism.  (Clarence Irving Lewis, Values and Imperatives: Studies in Ethics, ed. John Lange [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969], 151-2)

 

 

 

Tatyana Tolstaya on Collectivism:

Taken individually, in short, everyone is not good. Perhaps this is true, but then how did all these scoundrels manage to constitute a good people? The answer is that “the people” is not “constituted of.” According to [collectivists] “the people” is a living organism, not a “mere mechanical conglomeration of disparate individuals.” This, of course, is the old, inevitable trick of totalitarian thinking: “the people” is posited as unified and whole in its multiplicity. It is a sphere, a swarm, an anthill, a beehive, a body. And a body should strive for perfection; everything in it should be smooth, sleek, and harmonious. Every organ should have its place and its function: the heart and brain are more important than the nails and the hair, and so on. If your eye tempts you, then tear it out and throw it away; cut off sickly members, curb those limbs that will not obey, and fortify your spirit with abstinence and prayer. (Tatyana Tolstaya, “The Grand Inquisitor,” The New Republic, June 29, 1992, p. 33.)

 

Nagel on Forced Generosity:

Most people are not generous when asked to give voluntarily, and it is unreasonable to ask that they should be. Admittedly there are cases in which a person should do something although it would not be right to force him to do it. But here I believe that the reverse is true. Sometimes it is proper to force people to do something even though it is not true that they should do it without being forced. It is acceptable to compel people to contribute to the support of the indigent by automatic taxation, but unreasonable to insist that in the absence of such a system they ought to contribute voluntarily. (Thomas Nagel, “Libertarianism Without Foundations,” in Jeffrey Paul, Ed., Reading Nozick [Rowman & Littlefield, 1981].)

 

Duffel on Libertarian Autonomy:

‘The idea that people are sovereign beings does not allow us to infer that they have an obligation to respect each others’ sovereignty.’ ‘Libertarian Natural Rights,’ Critical Review, Vol. 16, No 4 (2004), p. 371.

 

Tibor Machan back at Duffel:

“Few if any libertarians hold that just being sovereign suffices to obligate one to respect the sovereignty of others. Van Duffel, while quoting a passage from my book Individuals and Their Rights, fails to examine how in that work I argue for that obligation. Essentially I show that the moral responsibility to think, to conduct oneself as a rational individual, demonstrates to one ‘who would,’ as Locke might have put it, ‘but consult one’s reason,’ that a regime of individual rights is to one’s rational self-interest. That, in turn, obligates one to abide by that regime and respect other’s sovereignty. However, this version of “self-interest” is not reducible to something benefiting one in the fashion as, say, a pair of new shoes would. Instead the self-interest involved here concerns the flourishing of oneself as a human being, fundamentally, an interest that is shared among human beings who live in communities. It is more akin to what economists call a public good, albeit it is clearly also a private one.”

 

 

 

Oprah Winfrey on Wealth:

“I was coming back from Africa on one of my trips, …I had taken one of my wealthy friends with me. She said, ‘Don’t you just feel guilty? Don’t you just feel terrible?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. I do not know how my being destitute is going to help them.’ Then I said when we got home, ‘I’m going home to sleep on my Pratesi sheets right now and I’ll feel good about it.'” (04/10/06, http://people.aol.com/people/article/0,26334,1182572,00.html)

 

Thomas Paine on Taxation:

“What at first was plunder, assumed the softer name of revenue; and the power originally usurped, they affected to inherit.” The Rights of Man, Chapter II, “Of the Origin of the Present Old Governments” http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/paine/thomas/p147r/p2ch2.html

 

Reductionism from All the King’s Men:

“Dirt’s a funny thing,” the Boss said. “Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?”  Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

 

Kolakowski on coercive communities:

“There has never been, and there will never be, an institutional means of

making people brothers. Fraternity under compulsion is the most malignant

idea devised in modern times; it is the perfect path to totalitarian

tyranny.”  Leszek Kolakowski (“My Correct Views on Everything”)

 

Aristotle on Choice:

[W]e feel anger and fear without choice, but the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice. Further, in respect of the passions we are said to be moved, but in respect of the virtues and the vices we are said not to be moved but to be disposed in a particular way. (NE, 1106a3 ff.)

 

Amartya Sen on Rights:

Indeed, the connection between public reasoning and the formulation and use of human rights is extremely important to understand.  Any general plausibility that these ethical claims, or their denials, have is dependent, on this theory, on their survival and flourishing when they encounter unobstructed discussion and scrutiny, along with adequately wide informational availability. (“Elements of a Theory of Rights,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32.4 [2004] p. 349.)

 

Menckenism:

“If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.”  H. L. Mencken, THE WEEK, September 8, 2007, p. 19.

 

 

Benjamin Libet:

Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist, reports that “the conscious will retains a right to veto [an] action in the last few milliseconds. According to this model, unconscious impulses to perform a volitional act are open to suppression by the conscious efforts of the subject.”

 

1. R. Haldeman to Richard Nixon, Re young Rumsfeld on the Pentagon Papers.

“To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the President can be wrong.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/opinion/28ellsberg.html

 

Friedrich Ratzel, German anthropologist:

Man is a piece of the earth—not an exception, nor one with something added from outside. Man is an actor in nature, not a spectator of nature. And in reverse man and his behavior are as illustrative of nature as is an atom or a solar system.  There are not two worlds.  Man, however, is not abased by being a piece of nature. Rather Nature becomes, among other things, that which includes man with all his ways and byways…. In brief—Nature is the kind of realm in which thinking goes on. Thinking is not a derivative from the eating of a tree of knowledge.

 

Evelyn Waugh on the Welfare State [on BBC 1953]:

[The welfare state is a fraud] [b]ecause it’s promising what it can never do. It tries to promise, for example, security for old people; that lunatics will be segregated from sane people. It tries to promise that people will be healthier.  It tries to promise that people will be educated.  And in all these things, it is notably and obviously failing. [THE WEEK, 5/3/08:45]

 

Karl Marx on the human essence:

“The human essence is the true collectivity of man,” Karl Marx. “Critical Remarks on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’” (in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, David McLellan, ed., Oxford UP, 1077, p. 126)

Also, “for only to social man is nature available as a bond with other men, as the basis of his own existence for others and theirs for him, and as the vital element in human reality; only to social man is nature the foundation of his own human existence.” (ibid. 90)

 

Will Durant about Robespierre:

“Power dements even more than it corrupts.” (Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975], p. 81.)

 

John Benson on Singer’s Doctrine:

“Peter Singer’s supreme principle is that all sentient beings are entitled to equal consideration of their interests. A being has interests if it is capable of suffering and enjoyment. This capacity is a prerequisite for having interests at all, and the actual interests that a being has are determined by the particular kinds and degrees of suffering and enjoyment of which it is capable. Equal interests must be equally respected, without regard to the species of the creatures whose interests they are. One may treat two creatures differently because one is less sensitive than the other to some kind of suffering, but two equally sensitive creatures may not be treated differently merely because they belong to different species. If my dog and I both have headaches, then the dog should have the one available aspirin if it has the worse headache. To treat the dog’s pain as less important because it is a dog. not a man, is speciesism (a nasty word for a nasty thing).” John Benson, “Duty and the Beast,” Philosophy 53 (October 1978): 529-49, at 530.

 

Versenyi on knowing human nature:

“If human nature is unknowable then so is human good and it is impossible to talk about human excellence in general. Indeed it is impossible to talk about man as such, since man as such could not even be identified. Barring all knowledge of human nature–that which makes a man a man–the word man would mean nothing and we could not even conceive of man as a definite being distinguishable from all other beings.  Consequently anything we might way about man would be necessarily meaningless, including the statement that human nature as such is unknowable to man.  Thus the postulate of the strict unknowability of man is self-contradictory.  To the extent that we talk about man we obviously hold that his nature is, in some respect at least, knowable.” (Laszlo Versenyi, “Virtue as a Self-Directed Art,” The Personalist [Summer 1972], p. 282.)

 

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall:

“… But one thing is certain, and it is that you owe a natural obedience to your King, as every subject does….” (from Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall [Henry Holy/John McCrae Books, 2009; excerpted in The New York Review of Books, July 12, 2008, p. 22)

 

Sherman Alexie (Flight):

So who cares if Edgar was an Indian or not? His Indian identity was completely secondary to his primary identity as a plane-crashing asshole. (p. 11)

 

Ayn Rand on selfishness:

“Since selfishness is ‘concern for one’s own interests,’ the Objectivists ethics uses that concepts in its exact and purest sense…” Ayn Rand, Introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness.

 

John Maynard Keynes on freedom:

“Let us clear from the ground the metaphysical or general principles upon which, from time to time, laissez-faire has been founded. It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities. There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately.

“We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail what Burke termed “one of the finest problems in legislation, namely, to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion.” (Quoted by McCulloch in his Principles of Political Economy). We have to discriminate between what Bentham, in his forgotten but useful nomenclature, used to term Agenda and Non-Agenda, and to do this without Bentham’s prior presumption that interference is, at the same time, ‘generally needless’ and ‘generally pernicious.’ (Bentham’s Manual of Political Economy, published posthumously, in Bowring’s edition – 1843). Perhaps the chief task of economists at this hour is to distinguish afresh the Agenda of government from the Non-Agenda; and the companion task of politics is to devise forms of government within a democracy which shall be capable of accomplishing the Agenda.” John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez (Hogarth Press, 1926 [based on a lecture given by him at the University of Berlin in June 1926].)

 

“Lord” Chesterfield (1694-1773):

Examine carefully and re-consider all your notions of things, analyze them, and discover their component parts, and see if habit and prejudice are not the principal ones; weigh the matter, upon which you are to form your opinion, in the equal and important scales of reason.

 

Ted Honderich:

“[S]hould one part of the response of affirmation [of determinism] be a move to the Left in politics”? How Free Are You? (Oxford University Press, 1993)

 

Alan Brinkley on the New Deal:

“….Roosevelt’s initiatives did not, in the end, left the country out of the Great Depression.  At no time in the first eight years of the New Deal did unemployment drop below 15 percent.  At no time did economic activity reach levels comparable to those of a decade earlier; and, while there were periods when the economy seemed to be recovering, none of them lasted very long.  And so this bold, active, and creative moment in our history proved to be a failure at its central task.  Understanding what went wrong could help us avoid making the same mistakes today….”  “No Deal,” The New Republic (December 31, 2008), p. 12.

 

Natural not conventional Rights:

“…Human rights are not bestowed by a state. Every person is born with inherent rights to dignity and freedom. The government exists for the protection of the human rights of its citizens. The exercise of state power must be authorized by the people. The succession of political disasters in China’s recent history is a direct consequences of the ruling regime’s disregard for human rights.” (The New York Review of Books, January 15, 2009, p. 54)

 

Lincoln on Equality:

Referring to “the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration,” [Lincoln

continued,] “I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to

include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all

respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect,

moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable

distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal-equal

in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the

pursuit of happiness.” This they said, and this meant. They did not mean to

assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that

equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.

In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to

declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as

circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free

society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly

looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained,

constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its

influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of

all colors everywhere. The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of

no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was

placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors

meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to

those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the

hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed

tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and

commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut

to crack.”  Abraham Lincoln response to the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (1857).

 

Cromwell on Liberty

“It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it.” (from THE WEEK, February 21, 2009, p. 19.)

 

Abraham Lincoln:

“No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.”

 

George Eliot:

“You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”

Middlemarch (Oxford Library Classics, 1996 [1871]), p. 517.

 

Walter Lippman on Power:

“Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual.  For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.”  Walter Lippman, THE GOOD SOCIETY (Boston: Little, Brown Co., 1937), pp. 105-106.

 

Lincoln the Philosopher:

“[The American system…] has a philosophical cause.  Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity.  There is something back of these, entwined itself more closely about the human heart.  That something, is the principle ‘Liberty for all’ – the principle that clears the path to all – gives hope to all – and, by consequences, enterprise, and industry to all.”  Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on the Constitution and The Union (1861), in Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4 (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1953), pp. 168-69.

 

Shelley on Power:

“The man

Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Power, like a desolating pestilence,

Pollutes whate’er it touches.” * Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Queen Mab” (1813).

Ethical Egoism:

“If I am not for myself, who shall be for me?”

Jewish sage Hillel

 

John Stossel:

“When one looks at long series of Earth’s temperatures, one finds that they have gone up and down irregularly, over long and short periods, on all time scales from years to millennia.”

 

Frederick Bastiat ‘s “Broken Window Fallacy” (from Wikipedia):

The parable [of the broken window] describes a shopkeeper whose window is broken by a little boy. Everyone sympathizes with the man whose window was broken, but pretty soon they start to suggest that the broken window makes work for the glazier, who will then buy bread, benefiting the baker, who will then buy shoes, benefiting the cobbler, etc. Finally, the onlookers conclude that the little boy was not guilty of vandalism; instead he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town.

 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.”

 

Hudson following Comte:

“The ability that any of us have to earn income and acquire wealth depends only partly on our own individual efforts.  It relies as well on the operation of political, economic, and social institutions that make it possible for any of us to ‘earn a living.’ . . .Viewed in this light, those deductions from my paycheck can be seen as reimbursements to society for that portion of my earnings derived from social goods.” William E. Hudson, The Libertarian Illusions: Ideology, Public Policy, and the Assault on the Common Good (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2008), p. 43.

From On Liberty, John Stuart Mill:

“Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government.  If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government: if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employes of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.  And the evil would be greater, the more efficiently and scientifically the administrative machinery was constructed – the more skilful the arrangements for obtaining the best qualified hands and heads with which to work it.”  In Chapter V of On Liberty:

http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=233&chapter=16560&layout=html&Itemid=27

 

Abraham Lincoln:

“None are so deeply interested to resist the present rebellion as the working people. Let them beware of prejudice, working division and hostility among themselves. The most notable feature of a disturbance in your city last summer was the hanging of some working people by other working people. It should never be so. The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues and kindreds. Nor should this lead to a war upon property, or the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.” Abraham Lincoln’s Response to 1864 NYC Race Riot

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes

“He [Holmes] did not have a curmudgeon’s feelings about his own taxes.  A secretary who exclaimed, ‘Don’t you hate to pay taxes!’ was rebuked with the hot response, ‘No, young feller.  I like to pay taxes.  With them I buy civilization.'” Felix Frankfurter, Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court (New York: Atheneum, 1965; originally published by Harvard University Press, 1938, 1961, page 71).

 

John Rawls on Character:

“The assertions that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is … problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim now credit.” A Theory of Justice (104)

 

 

Aristotle on Tragedy of Commons:

That all persons call the same thing mine in the sense in which each does so may be a fine thing, but it is impracticable; or if the words are taken in the other sense, such a unity in no way conduces to harmony.  And there is another objection to the proposal.  For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.  Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual.  For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few.” (Politics, 1262a30-37)

 

John Maynard Keynes on Ideas:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 383.

 

Baruch Spinoza, on government:

The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others.  No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty.

Theological-Political Treatise (1670)

 

Groucho Marx on Politics:

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. (THE WEEK, 11/6/10, p. 23)

 

Maugham on animal rights

“…It suggests itself to them that the graceful creatures, whose habits they have studied, have as much right to life as they; they get a sort of affection for them, and it is only unwillingly that they take their guns to kill a tiger that is frightening the villagers, or woodcock or snipe for the pot….” W. Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour (Vintage Classics, 1930), p. 85.

 

Maugham on power:

“…even the most sensible person can very easily get above himself: grant him certain privileges and before you know where you are he will claim them as his inalienable right; lend him a little authority and he will play the tyrant. Give a fool a uniform and sew a tab or two on his tunic and he thinks that his word is law…” The Gentleman in the Parlour (Vintage Classics, 1930), p. 91.

 

 

Mencken’s public choice theory:

“These men [and women], in point of fact, are seldom if ever moved by anything rationally describable as public spirit; there is actually no more public spirit among them than among so many burglars or street-walkers.  Their purpose, first, last and all the time, is to promote their private advantage, and to that end, and that end alone, they exercise all the vast powers that are in their hands.  Sometimes the thing they want is mere security in their jobs; sometimes they want gaudier and more lucrative jobs; sometimes they are content with their jobs and their pay but yearn for more power….” H. L. Mencken (“On Government,” Prejudices)

 

Bruce Ackerman:

“Roosevelt and the New Deal Congress had not chosen to codify their new constitutional principles by enacting a few formal amendments, of the sort contemplated by Article Five.  Instead, the President and Congress left it to the Justices themselves to codify the New Deal revolution in a series of transformative judicial opinions, threatening to pack the Court unless it accepted this novel constitutional responsibility.”  Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1991), p. 119.

 

Richard Epstein: What is the police power?

“…the police power [is] the ability of the state to deal with matters of health, safety, general welfare, or morals.”

 

St. Augustine from City of God:

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”

 

Henning Mankell on objectivity:

“The day we stop searching for the truth, which is never objective but under the best circumstances based on facts, is the day on which our system of justice collapses completely….” From The Man from Beijing (Knopf, 2010)

 

Charles de Gaulle:

“In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.” http://quotationsbook.com/quote/25662/

 

Heilbroner on labor and socialism:

“Indeed, the creation of socialism as a new mode of production can properly be compared to the moral equivalent of war—war against the old order, in this case—and will need to amass and apply the power commensurate with the requirements of a massive war.  This need not entail the exercise of command in an arbitrary or dictatorial fashion, but certainly it requires the curtailment of the central economic freedom of bourgeois society, namely, the right of individuals to own, and therefore to withhold if they wish, the means of production, including their own labor.  The full preservation of this bourgeois freedom would place the attainment of socialism at the mercy of property owners who could threaten to deny their services to society—and again I refer to their labor, not just to material resources—if their terms were not met….” Robert Heilbroner, Marxism Far and Against (NY: WW Norton, 1980), p. 157.

 

Scott Turow on human reason:

“In human affairs, reason would never fully triumph; but there was no better cause to champion.” The Burden of Proof,

 

Judge Richard Posner ‘s Subjectivism:

“It was right to try the Nazi leaders [at Nuremburg] rather than to shoot them out of hand in a paroxysm of disgust…. But it was not right because a trial could produce proof that the Nazis really were immoralists; they were, but according to our lights, not theirs.” “Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory,” 111, Harvard Law Review, 1998, 1644-45.

 

Nazism:

“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”  Adolf Hitler, May 1, 1927

 

Phyllis Diller in How To Live Forever:

“[I met] a man so old that his blood type as been discontinued.” (TNR, June 9, 2011, p. 20)

 

Machan on “ought implies can”

The idea that it isn’t true that “ought” implies “can” (i.e., that if one ought to do something, it must be the case that one can either do it or not do it) relies upon a revision of what “ought” means. It is argued that “ought” means, say in “You ought to tell the truth,” that one is being encouraged or supported or urged to do this, not that one has the moral responsibility to do it even if one chooses not to. See, for the skeptical position, Paul Saka, “Ought does not imply Can,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2 (April 2000), pp. 93-105. However, see Tibor R. Machan, Initiative—Human Agency and Society (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000).

 

 

 

George Orwell on politics:

“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries, but between authoritarians and libertarians.” (A Life in Letters, quoted in The New York Review of Books, 10/29/11, p. 101)

 

“What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.”  A Life in Letters

 

Keynes on his ideas & the Third Reich:

Keynes, writing in the foreword to the German edition to the General Theory, indicated the affinity between the Third Reich’s political economy and his own views: “[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.”

 

Tibor Machan:

“La libertà non è compatibile con le imposte. La verità è che si tratta di una maniera ben poco civile per ottenere fondi”.

 

Dietrick Dörner on good intentions:

“The conviction that our intentions are unquestionably good may sanctify the most questionable means.”  Dietrich Dörner, psychologist at U of Bamberg, Germany.

 

Nussbaum on Libertarianism:

“A simple ‘get the state off our backs’ position may look attractive when we are thinking about the sexlives of middle-class men, but it is clearly inadequate to deal with the situation of women and other vulnerable groups.  There is no consent where there is pervasive intimidation and hierarchy.” Martha C. Nussbaum, “Experiments in Living (Review of Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal),” The New Republic, January 3, 2000, p. 33.

 

Aquinas on Free Will:

“[M]an acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. And forasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have a free-will.” (Summa Theologica, Q. 93.)

Religion and Liberty:
Man cannot be forced to accept the truth. He can be drawn toward the truth only by his own nature, that is, by his own freedom . . . This has always been the teaching of the Church. Crossing the Threshold of Hope, John Paul II, (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 190

Thucydides on the commons:
[T]hey devote a very small fraction of the time to the consideration of any public object, most of it to the prosecution of their own objects.  Meanwhile, each fancies that no harm will come to his neglect, that it is the business of somebody else to look after this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately, the common cause imperceptibly decays. (Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, bk. I, sec. 141).

From individual property rights (including rights to one’s own body and the fruits of one’s labor) these early modern thinkers derived lessons about consent, governmental accountability, and resistance to abuses of power. Cary J. Nederman. “Political Theory and Subjective Rights in 14th Century England,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 58 (Spring 1996), p. 327.

Von Mises on Liberalism:
No sect and no political party has believed that it could afford to forgo advancing its cause by appealing to men’s senses. Rhetorical bombast, music and song resound, banners wave, flowers and colors serve as symbols, and the leaders seek to attach their followers to their own person. Liberalism has nothing to do with all this. It has no party flower and no party color, no party song and no party idols, no symbols and no slogans. It has the substance and the arguments. These must lead it to victory. (Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism German edition, 1927; latest English edition Copyright 1985 The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington, NY. Translation by Ralph Raico. Online edition Copyright The Mises Institute, 2000)

Charles Baudelaire on Commerce:
Commerce is satanic, because it is the basest and vilest form of egoism.
The spirit of every business-man is completely depraved.
Commerce is natural, therefore shameful.
The Intimate Journals, trns. Christophere Isherwood (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). P. 51.

Ross & van den Haag on Free Will and Morality:
Even if science cannot pronounce on the sub­ject of moral conduct, it would seem to he rele­vant to a factual matter: Is man really free to choose? If science can answer that question, it can show whether moral conduct is possible at all. For unless men are free to choose between alternatives, they are not moral agents. Only if man is free to choose does he fulfill the necessary condition for the existence of morals. And if he is not free to choose, there can he no morals. (Ralph Ross and Ernest van den Haag, The Fabric of Society [Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1957], pp. 286.)

Roger Trigg  on Realism & Objectivity:

“It is a paradox that man can demand the centre of the stage, insisting that everything should depend on him, and yet in the end find that in doing so he has lost his rationality and freedom.  Realism takes the possibility of error and ignorance seriously, but it also gives men the chance of notable success in extending the range of their understanding.  It gives them something to reason about, while acknowledging that they are free to make mistakes.” (Reality at Risk, p. 197)

“Without objective reality, we can say nothing true, and without the possibility of truth and error, there can be no possibility of rational judgment. Without rationality, men can have no freedom of choice.” (Ibid., p. 197)

Plato on self-interest:
Crito, “When you are gone, Socrates, how can we best act to please you?”  Socrates: “Just follow my old recipe, my friend: do yourselves concern yourselves with your own true self-interest; then you will oblige me, and mine and yourself too.”

Albert Einstein on Ethics:

The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil from the spirit of man.

 

Luck:

Chance favors the prepared.

Louis Pasteur

Blaise Pascal on Thinking:

 

“Let us labour, then, to think well, for such is the foundation of morality.” Quoted in THE WEEK, July 27, 2002, p. 17.

 

Wittgenstein on being better and having a better mind:

“I am working diligently and wish I were better and had a better mind. And these both are  one and the same….” Engelmann, P., Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir. B.F. McGuinness (ed.) (Oxford 1967), S.4. [my own translation, TRM]

Machan on the human mind:
“While the human mind has the remarkable capacity to be creative and inventive, it goes hand in hand with the equal capacity to produce BS to justify all kinds of rotten impulses.”  TRM

Mencius on the role of thinking:

‘Though equally human, why are some men guided one way and others guided another way?’ ‘The organs of hearing and sight are unable to think and can be misled by external things.  When one thing acts on another, all it does is attract it.  The organ of the heart [= mind] can think.  But it will find the answer only if it does think; otherwise it will not find the answer.’ — Mencius (4th-century BC Confucian)

 

 

 

Greer Garson on Rights:

“Why should I hate you?  You have a right to your luck, to your life.” In Desire Me (1947)

 

Parker Thomas Moon in Individualism:

Language often obscures truth.  More than is ordinarily realized, our eyes are blinded to the facts of international relations by tricks of the tongue.  When one uses the simple monosyllable “France” one thinks of France as a unit, an entity.  When to avoid awkward repetition we use a personal pronoun in referring to a country–when for example we say “France sent her troops to conquer Tunis”–we impute not only unity but personality to the country.  The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and-blood men and women who are the true actors.  How different it would be if we had no such word as “France,” and had to say instead–thirty-eight million men, women and children of very diversified interests and beliefs, inhabiting 218,000 square miles of territory!  Then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: “A few of these thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis.”  This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions.  Who are the “few”?  Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis?  And why did these obey?  Empire-building is done not by “nations” but by men.  The problem before us is to discover the men, the active, interested minorities in each nation, who are directly interested in imperialism, and then to analyze the reasons why the majorities pay the expenses and fight the wars necessitated by imperialist expansion.  (Parker Thomas Moon, Imperialism and World Politics [New York: The MacMillan Company, 1930], p. 58

 

Iris Murdoch on Meta-Ethics:

“… I would suggest that at the level of serious common sense and of an ordinary non-philosophical reflection about the nature of morals it is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one’s eyes but of a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline.

“The place of choice is certainly a different one [from that of the existentialists] if we think in terms of a world which is compulsively present to the will, and the discernment and exploration of which is a slow business.  Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the `decision’ lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be `cultivated’.  If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is ultimate condition to be aimed at.

“Will and reason then are not entirely separate faculties in the moral agent. Will continually influences belief, for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality.”  (The Sovereignty of the Good, pp38-40)

 

John Acton on liberty:

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare…

In every age [liberty’s] progress has been beset by its natural enemies: by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food.

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

Liberty is the prevention of control by others.  This requires self-control…

Liberty alone demands, for its realization, the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.

Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together.  Liberty is not a means to a higher political end.  It is itself the highest political end.  It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.

Liberty enables us to do our duty unhindered by the state, by society, by ignorance and error.  We are free in proportion as we are safe from these impediments…

…obscure ethics imply imperfect liberty.  For liberty comes not with any ethical system, but with a very developed one.

…sanctifying freedom…teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.

…by birth all men are free.

…conscience imperatively demands a corresponding measure of personal liberty…With this no human authority can be permitted to interfere.  We are bound to extend to the utmost, and to guard from every encroachment, the sphere in which we can act in obedience to the sole voice of conscience, regardless of any other consideration.

…the interest of individuals is above the exclusive interest of the state. The power of the whole is not to be set in the balance for a moment with freedom-that is, the conscience of the subject-and those who act on other principle are the worst of criminals.

It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people to govern others.  Every man is the best, the most responsible, judge of his own advantage.

The great question is to discover, not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the conscience of mankind.

The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom.

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern.  Every class is unfit to govern.

Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.

Laws are made for the public good…The public good is not to be considered, if it is purchased at the expense of an individual.

The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust.

There are many things the government can’t do, many good purposes it must renounce.  It must leave them to the enterprise of others.  It cannot feed the people.  It cannot enrich the people.  It cannot teach the people.

Popular power may be tainted with the same poison as personal power.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather if that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.

Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.

…the possession of unlimited power…corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding…

There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders…

There are principles which override precedents…there is such a thing as a higher law.

…all legislation must conform [under a law of nature]…by the voice of universal reason…a principle embracing all mankind… A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved.

 

1. H. Auden on altruism:

We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.

(THE WEEK, Nov. 16, 2002, p. 19)

 

John Philpot Curran and Wendell Phillips:

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  (Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), abolitionist, orator and columnist for The Liberator, paraphrasing John Philpot Curran (above) in a speech before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society in 1852, according to The Dictionary of Quotations edited by Bergen Evans.)

 

Hazlitt on the Justice of Liberty:

The superior freedom of the capitalist system, its superior justice, and its superior productivity are not three superiorities, but one.   The justice follows from the freedom and the productivity follows from the freedom and the justice. [Henry Hazlitt quoted in The Free­man, June 1993, p. 225].

 

Not “Our” values:

Many times in the last year we have heard: “Our values are under threat.” They are; and we should–we must–defend them.  But not because they are ours; for that really would be a regression to the dark side of human nature.  If we take this thought to heart, we shall not, as we should not, fear that in defending them we may be guilty of a kind of cultural imperialism.  And we will appreciate that, in the deepest sense, the values at stake are not “ours”–not peculiarly American, English, French, or even Western, but human: values, that is, with the capacity to enhance human flourishing, and to appeal emotionally to human everywhere. [Professor Susan Haack (U. of Miami), “9/11/02,” Free Inquiry, Winter 2002/03, p. 12.]

 

Jesus on Trade:

Then he entered the temple area and began driving out those who were selling.  “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be a house of prayer’; but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”  Bible, Luke 19:45.

 

Nietzsche on Disciples:

“The first generation of disciples to any new philosophy is not a sufficient refutation of that philosophy” (attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche).

 

Maugham on Freedom:

“If a nation or an individual values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too.” –W. Somerset Maugham

 

Milton Friedman on morality:

“The liberal conceives of men as imperfect beings.  He regards the problem of social organization to be as much a negative problem of preventing ‘bad’ people from doing harm as of enabling ‘good’ people to do good; and, of course, ‘bad’ and ‘good’ people may be the same people, depending on who is judging them.” (Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, p.12)

 

Friedman on Sin:

“I think that the crucial question that anybody who believes in freedom has to ask himself is whether to let another man be free to sin.  If you really know what sin is, if you could be absolutely certain that you had the revealed truth, then you could not let another man sin.  You have to stop him.” “Interview with Milton Friedman,” Reason, December 1974, p. 5.

 

Rawls on Self-interest & Friendship:

“Among persons who never acted in accordance with their duty of justice except as reasons of self-interest and expediency dictated there would be no bonds of friendship and mutual trust.” (TOJ, p. 488)

 

Anonymous on Democracy:

“When democracy goes against you, it’s a conspiracy; when it favors you, it’s the will of the people.”

 

Josephson on business ethics:

There’s no such thing as business ethics; there’s just ethics. And ethics makes no concessions for the real or imagined necessities of making a profit.  (Michael S. Josephson, Founder and CEO, Josephson Institute of Ethics)

 

 

Spiritualism in Bible:

If you have been raised by Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are in earth.                                                  Colossians 3:1-4.

Alan Furst on the world:

“I had a friend, a Russian, he had theories about these things–a world of bad people and good people, a war that never seems to end, you have to take sides.  I don’t know, maybe that’s the way it is.”  Cpt. De Milja, The Polish Officer, by Alan Furst (p. 286)

Aquinas on Free Will:

[M]an acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. And forasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have a free-will.” (Summa Theologica, Q. 93.)

Montaigne on Misanthropy:

Of all our diseases, the worst is to despise our own being

Diogenes Laertius reporting on Diogenes , the Cynic:

Once he saw the officials of a temple leading away some one who had stolen

a bowl belonging to the treasurers, and said, ‘The great thieves are leading

away the little thief.’

Machan on gaining from bad institutions:

Getting benefits from a bad practice or institution is only wrong

if one supports it and isn’t willing to give it up once it is abolished.

From “Trying to Silence the Rebels Within”.

http://www.cato.org/dailys/04-02-02.html

1. S. Caldwell on Government:

The point to remember is that what Government gives it must first take away.

George Orwell on Autobiographies:

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.  George Orwell, quoted in The [London] Sunday Times [from THE WEEK, Sept. 13, 2003, p. 17]

Barnett on the Constitution:

A constitution is legitimate and binding in conscience to the extent that it protects the natural rights of those under its jurisdiction. “[Randy] Barnett: Restoring the Constitution,” Cato Policy Report, March/April 2004, p. 3.

Susan Sontag on Communism:

I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should have understood a very long time ago: that Communism is fascism–successful fascism, If you will. What we have called fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown=-that has, largely, failed. I repeat: not only is fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies–especially when their populations are moved to revolt–but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face. (“Communism and the Left” The Nation, 2-27-1982)

Chillingworth On skepticism:

No man’s error can be confuted who doth not . . . grant some true principle that contradicts his error.

William Chillingworth.

St. Augustine on happiness:

No man is happy except through the highest good, which is to be found and included in that truth which we call wisdom.

St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will (Library of Liberal Arts, 1964)

Roth on tribalism:

…One Sunday, a Sunday probably much like today, the two Gestapo officers went out drinking together and they got drunk, much the way, thanks to your hospitality, we are getting nicely drunk here. They had an argument. They were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist’s house and got the dentist out of bad and shot him. This enraged the other Nazi so much that the next morning he came to our house and he shot my father, and my brother also, who was eight. When he was taken before the German commandant, my father’s murderer explained, ‘He shot my Jew, so I shot his.’ ‘But why did you shoot the child?’ ‘That’s how God-damn angry I was, sir.’ They were reprimanded and told not to do it again. That was all….(From Philip Roth, The Prague Orgy [Vintage, 1985], pp. 19-20.)

Adam Smith & Invisible Hand:

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it. (The Wealth of Nations, B.IV, Ch.2, “Of Restraints upon the Importation from Foreign Countries,” in paragraph IV.2.9)

Sam Adams on rights:

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can. Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists, The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772 Old South Leaflets no. 173 (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, 1906) 7: 417.

Dr. Jonhson on stockbrokers:

A stockbroker is “a low wretch who gets money by buying and selling shares.” From Henry Hitchings, Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (London: John Murray).

Ayn Rand on the Mind-Body Problem:

Man is “an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness” (Rand, For the New Intellectual, 1961, p.142).

Theodore Schick on borderlines:

The point at which day turns into night or a hirsute person becomes bald cannot be precisely specified. But the distinctions between night and day or baldness and hirsuteness are as objective as they come. There are certainly borderline cases that reasonable people can disagree about, but there are also clear-cut cases where disagreement would be irrational. (Theodore Schick, “Let me Explain…” Philosophers’ Magazine, Issue 31, 3rd Quarter [2005], p. 59.)

On Democracy:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

(Attributed to Sir Alex Fraser Tytler [1742-1813] Lord Woodhouselee, Scottish jurist, professor and historian, supposedly from The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic, c.1799 but no book has been found.)

Ludwig von Mises on Creeping Socialism:

But if the trend of this policy will not change, the final result will only in accidental and negligible points differ from what happened in the England of Attlee and in the Germany of Hitler. The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments. Many people object. They stress the fact that most of the laws which aim at planning or at expropriation by means of progressive taxation have left some loopholes which offer to private enterprise a margin within which it can go on. That such loopholes still exist and that thanks to them this country is still a free country is certainly true. But this loopholes capitalism is not a lasting system. It is a respite. Powerful forces are at work to close these loopholes. From day to day the field in which private enterprise is free to operate is narrowed down. Of course, this outcome is not inevitable. The trend can be reversed as was the case with many other trends in history. … What we need is neither anti-socialism nor anti-communism but an open positive endorsement of that system to which we owe all the wealth that distinguishes our age from the comparatively straitened conditions of ages gone by. (Commercial and Financial Chronicle, May 4, 1950; also in Planning for Freedom and Other Essays and Addresses [South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1952].)

Galbraith on modern conservatives:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith, http://www.quoteworld.org/quotes/5170

John Locke on Delegated Powers:

First, It is not, nor can possibly be absolutely arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of the people: for it being but the joint power of every member of the society given up to that person, or assembly, which is legislator; it can be no more than those persons had in a state of nature before they entered into society, and gave up to the community: for no body can transfer to another more power than he has in himself; and no body has an absolute arbitrary power over himself, or over any other, to destroy his own life, or take away the life or property of another. A man, as has been proved, cannot subject himself to the arbitrary power of another; and having in the state of nature no arbitrary power over the life, liberty, or possession of another, but only so much as the law of nature gave him for the preservation of himself, and the rest of mankind; this is all he doth, or can give up to the common-wealth, and by it to the legislative power, so that the legislative can have no more than this. Their power, in the utmost bounds of it, is limited to the public good of the society. It is a power, that hath no other end but preservation, and therefore can never* have a right to destroy, enslave, or designedly to impoverish the subjects….(John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [Everyman, 1993], p. 182)

James Madison on Consent and Majority Rule:

“The first supposition is, that each individual, being previously independent of the others, the compact which is to make them one society must result from the free consent of every individual.

“But as the objects in view could not be attained, if every measure conducive to them required the consent of every member of society, the theory further supposes, either than it was part of the original compact, that the will of the majority was to be deemed the will of the whole, or that this was a law of nature, resulting from the nature of political society itself, the offspring of the natural wants of man.

“Whatever the hypothesis of the origin of the lex majoris partis, it is evident that it operates as a plenary substitute for the will of the whole society; and that the sovereignty of the society as vested in and exercisable by the majority, may do anything that could be rightfully done by the unanimous consent of the members; the reserved rights of individuals (or conscience for example) in becoming parties to the original compact being beyond the legitimate reach of sovereignty, wherever or however viewed.” James Madison, http://www.founding.com/guide/evidence/ge193.htm

“[t]here is no maxim … more liable to be misapplied … than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. Taking the word “interest” as synonymous with “ultimate happiness,” in which sense it is qualified with every necessary moral ingredient, the proposition is no doubt true. But taking it in the popular sense, as referring to immediate augmentation of property and wealth, nothing can be more false. In the latter sense, it would be the interest of the majority in every community to despoil and enslave the minority of individuals …. In fact, it is only re-establishing, under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure of right.” (Letter from James Madison to James Monroe (Oct. 5, 1786), in THE COMPLETE MADISON 45 (Saul K. Padover ed., 1953).

Shakespeare’s Shylock:

You take my house when you do take the prop

That doth sustain my house; you take my life

When you do take the means whereby I live.

Michael Ledeen on US and War:

Ken Adelman, a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, hoped that the conquest of Baghdad “emboldens leaders to drastic, not measured, approaches,” but it was left to Michael Ledeen, resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, to place the great victory in its clearest perspective. “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” (Quoted in Lewis Lapham, “The demonstration effect,” Harper’s Magazine June 2003.)

Leo Strauss on Standards:

If there is no standard higher than the ideal of our society, we are utterly unable to take a critical distance from that idea. But the mere fact that we can raise the question of the worth of the idea of our society shows that there is something in man that is not altogether in slavery to his society, and therefore that we are able, and hence obliged, to look for a standard with reference to which we can judge the ideals of our own as well as of any other society. That standard cannot be found in the needs of the various societies, for the societies and their parts have many needs that conflict with one another; the problem of priorities arises. This problem cannot be solved in a rational manner if we do not have a standard with reference to which we can distinguish between genuine needs and fancied needs and discern the hierarchy of the various types of genuine needs. The problem posed by the conflicting needs of society cannot be solved if we do not possess knowledge of natural right. [Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 3]

1. I. Lewis on Principles:

Whether a laissez-faire economy or state capitalism, or something in between, represents the ideal of social justice is not determined by any a priori principle of justice; and individual adherence to one or another such ideal must depend upon the empirically determined consequences of that manner of organizing the social economy which is in question, and upon the relative value assigned to such consequences—for example, the relative value of the larger freedom of individual initiative and, possibly, the greater productivity under private enterprise, as against the greater security of individuals and, perhaps, the gain in distributing goods more nearly according to need under socialism.  (Clarence Irving Lewis, Values and Imperatives: Studies in Ethics, ed. John Lange [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969], 151-2)

Leo Strauss on standards of right:

If there is no standard higher than the ideal of our society, we are utterly unable to take a critical distance from that idea. But the mere fact that we can raise the question of the worth of the idea of our society shows that there is something in man that is not altogether in slavery to his society, and therefore that we are able, and hence obliged, to look for a standard with reference to which we can judge the ideals of our own as well as of any other society. That standard cannot be found in the needs of the various societies, for the societies and their parts have many needs that conflict with one another; the problem if priorities arises. This problem cannot be solved in a rational manner if we do not have a standard with reference to which we can distinguish between genuine needs and fancied needs and discern the hierarchy of the various types of genuine needs. The problem posed by the conflicting needs of society cannot be solved if we do not possess knowledge of natural right. (Natural Right and History, 1971, p. 3)

Tatyana Tolstaya on Collectivism:

Taken individually, in short, everyone is not good. Perhaps this is true, but then how did all these scoundrels manage to constitute a good people? The answer is that “the people” is not “constituted of.” According to [collectivists] “the people” is a living organism, not a “mere mechanical conglomeration of disparate individuals.” This, of course, is the old, inevitable trick of totalitarian thinking: “the people” is posited as unified and whole in its multiplicity. It is a sphere, a swarm, an anthill, a beehive, a body. And a body should strive for perfection; everything in it should be smooth, sleek, and harmonious. Every organ should have its place and its function: the heart and brain are more important than the nails and the hair, and so on. If your eye tempts you, then tear it out and throw it away; cut off sickly members, curb those limbs that will not obey, and fortify your spirit with abstinence and prayer. (Tatyana Tolstaya, “The Grand Inquisitor,” The New Republic, June 29, 1992, p. 33.)

Nagel on Forced Generosity:

Most people are not generous when asked to give voluntarily, and it is unreasonable to ask that they should be. Admittedly there are cases in which a person should do something although it would not be right to force him to do it. But here I believe that the reverse is true. Sometimes it is proper to force people to do something even though it is not true that they should do it without being forced. It is acceptable to compel people to contribute to the support of the indigent by automatic taxation, but unreasonable to insist that in the absence of such a system they ought to contribute voluntarily. (Thomas Nagel, “Libertarianism Without Foundations,” in Jeffrey Paul, Ed., Reading Nozick [Rowman & Littlefield, 1981].)

Duffel on Libertarian Autonomy:

‘The idea that people are sovereign beings does not allow us to infer that they have an obligation to respect each others’ sovereignty.’ ‘Libertarian Natural Rights,’ Critical Review, Vol. 16, No 4 (2004), p. 371.

Machan back at Duffel:

“Few if any libertarians hold that just being sovereign suffices to obligate one to respect the sovereignty of others. Van Duffel, while quoting a passage from Individuals and Their Rights, fails to examine how in that work I argue for that obligation. Essentially I show that the moral responsibility to think, to conduct oneself as a rational individual, demonstrates to one ‘who would,’ as Locke might have put it, ‘but consult one’s reason,’ that a regime of individual rights is to one’s rational self-interest. That, in turn, obligates one to abide by that regime and respect other’s sovereignty. However, this version of “self-interest” is not reducible to something benefiting one in the fashion as, say, a pair of new shoes would. Instead the self-interest involved here concerns the flourishing of oneself as a human being, fundamentally, an interest that is shared among human beings who live in communities. It is more akin to what economists call a public good, albeit it is clearly also a private one.”

Oprah Winfrey on Wealth:

“I was coming back from Africa on one of my trips, …I had taken one of my wealthy friends with me. She said, ‘Don’t you just feel guilty? Don’t you just feel terrible?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. I do not know how my being destitute is going to help them.’ Then I said when we got home, ‘I’m going home to sleep on my Pratesi sheets right now and I’ll feel good about it.'” (04/10/06, http://people.aol.com/people/article/0,26334,1182572,00.html)

Thomas Paine on Taxation:

“What at first was plunder, assumed the softer name of revenue; and the power originally usurped, they affected to inherit.” The Rights of Man, Chapter II, “Of the Origin of the Present Old Governments” http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/paine/thomas/p147r/p2ch2.html

Reductionism from All the King’s Men:

“Dirt’s a funny thing,” the Boss said. “Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?”  Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Kolakowski on coercive communities:

“There has never been, and there will never be, an institutional means of

making people brothers. Fraternity under compulsion is the most malignant

idea devised in modern times; it is the perfect path to totalitarian

tyranny.”  Leszek Kolakowski (“My Correct Views on Everything”)

Aristotle on Choice:

[W]e feel anger and fear without choice, but the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice. Further, in respect of the passions we are said to be moved, but in respect of the virtues and the vices we are said not to be moved but to be disposed in a particular way. (NE, 1106a3 ff.)

???????:

Man is a piece of the earth—not an exception, nor one with something added from outside. Man is an actor in nature, not a spectator of nature. And in reverse man and his behavior are as illustrative of nature as is an atom or a solar system.  There are not two worlds.  Man, however, is not abased by being a piece of nature. Rather Nature becomes, among other things, that which includes man with all his ways and byways…. In brief—Nature is the kind of realm in which thinking goes on. Thinking is not a derivative from the eating of a tree of knowledge.

Amartya Sen on Rights:

Indeed, the connection between public reasoning and the formulation and use of human rights is extremely important to understand.  Any general plausibility that these ethical claims, or their denials, have is dependent, on this theory, on their survival and flourishing when they encounter unobstructed discussion and scrutiny, along with adequately wide informational availability. (“Elements of a Theory of Rights,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32.4 [2004] p. 349.)

Menckenism:

“If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.”  H. L. Mencken, THE WEEK, September 8, 2007, p. 19.

Benjamin Libet:

Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist, reports that “the conscious will retains a right to veto [an] action in the last few milliseconds. According to this model, unconscious impulses to perform a volitional act are open to suppression by the conscious efforts of the subject.”

1. R. Haldeman to Richard Nixon, Re young Rumsfeld on the Pentagon Papers.

“To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the President can be wrong.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/opinion/28ellsberg.html

Friedrich Ratzel, German anthropologist:

Man is a piece of the earth—not an exception, nor one with something added from outside. Man is an actor in nature, not a spectator of nature. And in reverse man and his behavior are as illustrative of nature as is an atom or a solar system.  There are not two worlds.  Man, however, is not abased by being a piece of nature. Rather Nature becomes, among other things, that which includes man with all his ways and byways…. In brief—Nature is the kind of realm in which thinking goes on. Thinking is not a derivative from the eating of a tree of knowledge.

Evelyn Waugh on the Welfare State [on BBC 1953]:

[The welfare state is a fraud] [b]ecause it’s promising what it can never do. It tries to promise, for example, security for old people; that lunatics will be segregated from sane people. It tries to promise that people will be healthier.  It tries to promise that people will be educated.  And in all these things, it is notably and obviously failing. [THE WEEK, 5/3/08:45]

Karl Marx on the human essence:

“The human essence is the true collectivity of man,” Karl Marx. “Critical Remarks on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’” (in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, David McLellan, ed., Oxford UP, 1077, p. 126)

Also, “for only to social man is nature available as a bond with other men, as the basis of his own existence for others and theirs for him, and as the vital element in human reality; only to social man is nature the foundation of his own human existence.” (ibid. 90)

Will Durant about Robespierre:

“Power dements even more than it corrupts.” (Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975], p. 81.)

John Benson on Singer’s Doctrine:

“Peter Singer’s supreme principle is that all sentient beings are entitled to equal consideration of their interests. A being has interests if it is capable of suffering and enjoyment. This capacity is a prerequisite for having interests at all, and the actual interests that a being has are determined by the particular kinds and degrees of suffering and enjoyment of which it is capable. Equal interests must be equally respected, without regard to the species of the creatures whose interests they are. One may treat two creatures differently because one is less sensitive than the other to some kind of suffering, but two equally sensitive creatures may not be treated differently merely because they belong to different species. If my dog and I both have headaches, then the dog should have the one available aspirin if it has the worse headache. To treat the dog’s pain as less important because it is a dog. not a man, is speciesism (a nasty word for a nasty thing).” John Benson, “Duty and the Beast,” Philosophy 53 (October 1978): 529-49, at 530.

Versenyi on knowing human nature:

“If human nature is unknowable then so is human good and it is impossible to talk about human excellence in general. Indeed it is impossible to talk about man as such, since man as such could not even be identified. Barring all knowledge of human nature–that which makes a man a man–the word man would mean nothing and we could not even conceive of man as a definite being distinguishable from all other beings.  Consequently anything we might way about man would be necessarily meaningless, including the statement that human nature as such is unknowable to man.  Thus the postulate of the strict unknowability of man is self-contradictory.  To the extent that we talk about man we obviously hold that his nature is, in some respect at least, knowable.” (Laszlo Versenyi, “Virtue as a Self-Directed Art,” The Personalist [Summer 1972], p. 282.)

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall:

“… But one thing is certain, and it is that you owe a natural obedience to your King, as every subject does….” (from Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall [Henry Holy/John McCrae Books, 2009; excerpted in The New York Review of Books, July 12, 2008, p. 22)

Sherman Alexie (Flight):

So who cares if Edgar was an Indian or not? His Indian identity was completely secondary to his primary identity as a plane-crashing asshole. (p. 11)

Ayn Rand on selfishness:

“Since selfishness is ‘concern for one’s own interests,’ the Objectivists ethics uses that concepts in its exact and purest sense…” Ayn Rand, Introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness.

John Maynard Keynes on freedom:

“Let us clear from the ground the metaphysical or general principles upon which, from time to time, laissez-faire has been founded. It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities. There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately.

“We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail what Burke termed “one of the finest problems in legislation, namely, to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion.” (Quoted by McCulloch in his Principles of Political Economy). We have to discriminate between what Bentham, in his forgotten but useful nomenclature, used to term Agenda and Non-Agenda, and to do this without Bentham’s prior presumption that interference is, at the same time, ‘generally needless’ and ‘generally pernicious.’ (Bentham’s Manual of Political Economy, published posthumously, in Bowring’s edition – 1843). Perhaps the chief task of economists at this hour is to distinguish afresh the Agenda of government from the Non-Agenda; and the companion task of politics is to devise forms of government within a democracy which shall be capable of accomplishing the Agenda.” John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez (Hogarth Press, 1926 [based on a lecture given by him at the University of Berlin in June 1926].)

“Lord” Chesterfield (1694-1773):

Examine carefully and re-consider all your notions of things, analyze them, and discover their component parts, and see if habit and prejudice are not the principal ones; weigh the matter, upon which you are to form your opinion, in the equal and important scales of reason.

Ted Honderich:

“[S]hould one part of the response of affirmation [of determinism] be a move to the Left in politics”? How Free Are You? (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Alan Brinkley on the New Deal:

“….Roosevelt’s initiatives did not, in the end, left the country out of the Great Depression.  At no time in the first eight years of the New Deal did unemployment drop below 15 percent.  At no time did economic activity reach levels comparable to those of a decade earlier; and, while there were periods when the economy seemed to be recovering, none of them lasted very long.  And so this bold, active, and creative moment in our history proved to be a failure at its central task.  Understanding what went wrong could help us avoid making the same mistakes today….”

“No Deal,” The New Republic (December 31, 2008), p. 12.

Natural not conventional Rights:

“…Human rights are not bestowed by a state. Every person is born with inherent rights to dignity and freedom. The government exists for the protection of the human rights of its citizens. The exercise of state power must be authorized by the people. The succession of political disasters in China’s recent history is a direct consequences of the ruling regime’s disregard for human rights.” (The New York Review of Books, January 15, 2009, p. 54)

Lincoln on Equality:

Referring to “the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration,” [Lincoln

continued,] “I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to

include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all

respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect,

moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable

distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal-equal

in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the

pursuit of happiness.” This they said, and this meant. They did not mean to

assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that

equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.

In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to

declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as

circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free

society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly

looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained,

constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its

influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of

all colors everywhere. The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of

no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was

placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors

meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to

those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the

hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed

tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and

commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut

to crack.”  Abraham Lincoln response to the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (1857).

“It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it.”

Oliver Cromwell, from THE WEEK, February 21, 2009, p. 19.

Abraham Lincoln:

“No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.”

George Eliot:

“You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”

Middlemarch (Oxford Library Classics, 1996 [1871]), p. 517.

Walter Lippman on Power:

“Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual.  For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.”  Walter Lippman, THE GOOD SOCIETY (Boston: Little, Brown Co., 1937), pp. 105-106.

Lincoln: Philosopher:

“[The American system…] has a philosophical cause.  Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity.  There is something back of these, entwined itself more closely about the human heart.  That something, is the principle ‘Liberty for all’ – the principle that clears the path to all – gives hope to all – and, by consequences, enterprise, and industry to all.”  Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on the Constitution and The Union (1861), in Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4 (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1953), pp. 168-69.

Shelley on Power:

“The man

Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Power, like a desolating pestilence,

Pollutes whate’er it touches.” * Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Queen Mab” (1813).

Ethical Egoism:

“If I am not for myself, who shall be for me?”

Jewish sage Hillel

John Stossel:

“When one looks at long series of Earth’s temperatures, one finds that they have gone up and down irregularly, over long and short periods, on all time scales from years to millennia.”

Frederick Bastiat ‘s “Broken Window Fallacy” (from Wikipedia):

The parable [of the broken window] describes a shopkeeper whose window is broken by a little boy. Everyone sympathizes with the man whose window was broken, but pretty soon they start to suggest that the broken window makes work for the glazier, who will then buy bread, benefiting the baker, who will then buy shoes, benefiting the cobbler, etc. Finally, the onlookers conclude that the little boy was not guilty of vandalism; instead he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town.

Contra Sunstein:

“…Human rights are not bestowed by a state. Every person is born with

inherent rights to dignity and freedom. The government exists for the

protection of the human rights of its citizens. The exercise of state

power must be authorized by the people. The succession of political

disasters in China’s recent history is a direct consequences of the ruling

regime’s disregard for human rights.” (The New York Review of Books,

January 15, 2009, p. 54)

 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.”

 

Hudson following Comte:

“The ability that any of us have to earn income and acquire wealth depends only partly on our own individual efforts.  It relies as well on the operation of political, economic, and social institutions that make it possible for any of us to ‘earn a living.’ . . .Viewed in this light, those deductions from my paycheck can be seen as reimbursements to society for that portion of my earnings derived from social goods.” William E. Hudson, The Libertarian Illusions: Ideology, Public Policy, and the Assault on the Common Good (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2008), p. 43.

 

From On Liberty, John Stuart Mill:

“Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government.  If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government: if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employes of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.  And the evil would be greater, the more efficiently and scientifically the administrative machinery was constructed – the more skilful the arrangements for obtaining the best qualified hands and heads with which to work it.”  In Chapter V of On Liberty:

http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=233&chapter=16560&layout=html&Itemid=27

 

Abraham Lincoln:

“None are so deeply interested to resist the present rebellion as the working people. Let them beware of prejudice, working division and hostility among themselves. The most notable feature of a disturbance in your city last summer was the hanging of some working people by other working people. It should never be so. The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues and kindreds. Nor should this lead to a war upon property, or the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”

Abraham Lincoln’s Response to 1864 NYC Race Riot

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes

“He [Holmes] did not have a curmudgeon’s feelings about his own taxes.  A secretary who exclaimed, ‘Don’t you hate to pay taxes!’ was rebuked with the hot response, ‘No, young feller.  I like to pay taxes.  With them I buy civilization.'” Felix Frankfurter, Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court (New York: Atheneum, 1965; originally published by Harvard University Press, 1938, 1961, page 71).

 

John Rawls on Character:

“The assertions that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is … problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim now credit.” A Theory of Justice (104)

 

Aristotle on Tragedy of Commons:

That all persons call the same thing mine in the sense in which each does so may be a fine thing, but it is impracticable; or if the words are taken in the other sense, such a unity in no way conduces to harmony.  And there is another objection to the proposal.  For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.  Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual.  For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few.” (Politics, 1262a30-37)

 

John Maynard Keynes on Ideas:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 383.

 

Baruch Spinoza, on government:

The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others.  No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty.

Theological-Political Treatise (1670)

 

Groucho Marx on Politics:

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. (THE WEEK, 11/6/10, p. 23)

 

Maugham on animal rights?

“…It suggests itself to them that the graceful creatures, whose habits they have studied, have as much right to life as they; they get a sort of affection for them, and it is only unwillingly that they take their guns to kill a tiger that is frightening the villagers, or woodcock or snipe for the pot….” W. Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour (Vintage Classics, 1930), p. 85.

 

Maugham on power:

“…even the most sensible person can very easily get above himself: grant him certain privileges and before you know where you are he will claim them as his inalienable right; lend him a little authority and he will play the tyrant. Give a fool a uniform and sew a tab or two on his tunic and he thinks that his word is law…” The Gentleman in the Parlour (Vintage Classics, 1930), p. 91.

 

Mencken’s public choice theory:

“These men [and women], in point of fact, are seldom if ever moved by anything rationally describable as public spirit; there is actually no more public spirit among them than among so many burglars or street-walkers.  Their purpose, first, last and all the time, is to promote their private advantage, and to that end, and that end alone, they exercise all the vast powers that are in their hands.  Sometimes the thing they want is mere security in their jobs; sometimes they want gaudier and more lucrative jobs; sometimes they are content with their jobs and their pay but yearn for more power….”H. L. Mencken (“On Government,” Prejudices)

 

Richard Epstein: What is the police power?

“…the police power [is] the ability of the state to deal with matters of health, safety, general welfare, or morals.”

 

St. Augustine from City of God:

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”

 

Henning Mankell on objectivity:

“The day we stop searching for the truth, which is never objective but under the best circumstances based on facts, is the day on which our system of justice collapses completely….” From The Man from Beijing (Knopf, 2010)

 

Charles de Gaulle:

“In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.” http://quotationsbook.com/quote/25662/

 

Heilbroner on labor and socialism:

“Indeed, the creation of socialism as a new mode of production can properly be compared to the moral equivalent of war—war against the old order, in this case—and will need to amass and apply the power commensurate with the requirements of a massive war.  This need not entail the exercise of command in an arbitrary or dictatorial fashion, but certainly it requires the curtailment of the central economic freedom of bourgeois society, namely, the right of individuals to own, and therefore to withhold if they wish, the means of production, including their own labor.  The full preservation of this bourgeois freedom would place the attainment of socialism at the mercy of property owners who could threaten to deny their services to society—and again I refer to their labor, not just to material resources—if their terms were not met….”  Robert Heilbroner, Marxism Far and Against (NY: WW Norton,  1980), p. 157.

 

Scott Turow on human reason:

“In human affairs, reason would never fully triumph; but there was no better cause to champion.” The Burden of Proof,

 

Nazism:

“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”  Adolf Hitler, May 1, 1927

 

Phyllis Diller in How To Live Forever:

“[I met] a man so old that his blood type as been discontinued.” (TNR, June 9, 2011, p. 20)

 

Machan on “ought implies can”

The idea that it isn’t true that “ought” implies “can” (i.e., that if one ought to do something, it must be the case that one can either do it or not do it) relies upon a revision of what “ought” means. It is argued that “ought” means, say in “You ought to tell the truth,” that one is being encouraged or supported or urged to do this, not that one has the moral responsibility to do it even if one chooses not to. See, for the skeptical position, Paul Saka, “Ought does not imply Can,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2 (April 2000), pp. 93-105. However, see Tibor R. Machan, Initiative—Human Agency and Society (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000).

 

George Stiegler on ethics:

[T]he very uncertainty of our ultimate ethical goals dictates a wide area of individual self-determination.  We are not able to supply a blueprint of the ideal life, but we are persuaded that even if it were known it would be ideal only for the person who individually and knowingly and voluntarily accepted it. (Five Lectures on Economic Problems, 1950)

 

George Orwell on politics:

“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries, but between authoritarians and libertarians.” (A Life in Letters, quoted in The New York Review of Books, 10/29/11, p. 101)

“What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.”  A Life in Letters

 

Keynes on his ideas & the Third Reich:

Keynes, writing in the foreword to the German edition to the General Theory, indicated the affinity between the Third Reich’s political economy and his own views: “[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.”

 

Tibor Machan:

“La libertà non è compatibile con le imposte. La verità è che si tratta di una maniera ben poco civile per ottenere fondi”.

 

Dietrick Dörner on good intentions:

“The conviction that our intentions are unquestionably good may sanctify the most questionable means.”  Dietrich Dörner, psychologist at U of Bamberg, Germany.

 

Marx on Envy:

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence.  But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut.  The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls. From Wage Labour and Capital

 

Marx on Property Rights:

…the right of man to property is the right to enjoy his possessions and dispose of the same arbitrarily, without regard for other then, independently from society, the right of selfishness….  Karl Marx, “The Early Writings 1837-1844” (Selected Writings, ed., David McLellan, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 53)

 

Bob Dylan on Success:

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.”  Bob Dylan THE WEEK

 

Collectivism:

“We need to see society as an extension of ourselves, an invisible part of our anatomy that assists us every day without dominating us and that, like our own arms and legs, we tend when injured, and whose welfare reconsider at all times.  The relation resembles that of a violinist to his instrument–useful but more than something useful, cared for like an esteemed friend.  If such a part of us fails, we do not discard it for a peg leg, nor are we fired from our job because we cannot play hopscotch.  We may be a disposable member of the symphony, but our violin is us to us.  The relation is somethings–oh dear–called love.”  William H. Gass, “Double Vision,” Harper’s Magazine, Oct. 2012, p. 78.

 

George Bernard Shaw:

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Everybody’s Political What’s What? (1944) ch. 30, Irish dramatist & socialist (1856 – 1950)

 

 

Thoughts on Private Property Rights:

This is – courtesy Don Boudreaux–from pages 1338-1339 of Robert Ellickson’s landmark 1993 Yale Law Review article “Property in Land” (footnotes removed; Ellickson’s quotation in the third paragraph is from pages 300-301 of William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Colony):

 

To finance their voyage, the Pilgrims formed a joint stock company with London investors.  At the investors’ insistence, the settlers agreed to pool output, land, capital, and profits during their first seven years abroad.  From this “common stock,” residents of the colony were to receive food and other necessities, and at the end of the seven-year period, the land and other assets were to be “equally divided betwixt” the investors and the settlers.  The colonists initially complied with the spirit of this contract.  Although they planted household gardens almost from the start, they collectivized initial field and livestock operations.  The setters had some agricultural successes, but they were unable to grow corn in their common field.  Within six months of reaching Plymouth, almost one-half of the population had perished from disease.

.

In 1624 the Plymouth colonists deviated from the investors’ plan and assigned each family from one to ten acres, depending on the number of family members.  This greatly increased productivity.

.

[Parcelization] had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corne was planted then other waise. . . .  The women now wente willingly into the field, and tooke their little-ones with them to set corne, which before would aledg weaknes and inabilitie; whome to have compelled would have bene thought great tiranie and oppression.