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2018 November 09
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"[N]o one’s ever been able to show me any
difference between democracy and brute force.
It’s just a majority ganging up on a minority with
the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred." |
"Fortunately, political freedom and economic progress are natural partners.
Despite capitalism's lingering reputation as the source of all the world's evils,
the fact remains that every single democracy is a capitalist country.
Half a century of economic experimentation proved beyond doubt that tyranny cannot yield prosperity. ...
Socialism collapsed because it is a policy of unrestrained intervention.
It tries to fix what is 'wrong' with the spontaneous, self-organizaing phenomenon called capitalism.
But, of course, a natural process cannot be 'fixed.' ...
Socialism is an ideology. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon." |
"No truly sophisticated proponent of repression
would be stupid enough to shatter
the façade of democratic institutions." |
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2018 November 08
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"The one thing
that doesn't abide by majority rule
is a person's conscience." |
"There is no maxim, in my opinion,
which is more liable to be misapplied, and which,
therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current,
that the interest of the majority
is the political standard of right and wrong." |
"Here the great art lies,
to discern in what the law is
to bid restraint and punishment,
and in what things
persuasion only is to work." |
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2018 November 07
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"Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty." |
"The act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember
that our whole way of life is predicated
on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well." |
"A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union." |
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2018 November 06
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"The first thing to learn
in intercourse with others
is non-interference with their own
particular ways of being happy,
provided those ways do not assume
to interfere by violence with ours." |
"Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress
that can beguile the brain and soul of man.
From him who will not give her all, she will have nothing.
She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray.
But when once the fierce heat
of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned
into the victim's heart,
he will know no other smile but hers." |
"Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint;
the more restraint on others to keep off from us,
the more liberty we have."
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2018 November 05
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"Socialism is but Catholicism addressing itself
not to the soul but to the sense of men...
[Both implore you to] accept authority,
accept the force which it employs,
resign yourself to all-powerful managers,
give up the free choice and the free act...
They both seek to sacrifice man." |
"If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valueable, and your freedom less complete." |
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies
to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right." |
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