The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.
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What a crazy world we live in! Trying to treat addiction as a legal problem, and trying to treat criminal read more
What a crazy world we live in! Trying to treat addiction as a legal problem, and trying to treat criminal misbehaviors using guns as a medical problem! Beam me up, Scotty. Ain't no intelligent life down here.
All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable read more
All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.
Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast read more
Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.
It is a dangerous and idle dream to think that the state can become rule by philosophers turned kings or read more
It is a dangerous and idle dream to think that the state can become rule by philosophers turned kings or scientists turned commissars. For if philosophers become kings or scientists commissars, they become politicians, and the powers given to the state are powers given to men who are rulers of states, men subject to all the limitations and temptations of their dangerous craft. Unless this is borne in mind, there will be a dangerous optimistic tendency to sweep aside doubts and fears as irrelevant, since, in the state that the projectors have in mind, power will be exercised by men of a wisdom and degree of moral virtue that we have not yet seen. It won't. It will be exercised by men who will be men first and rulers next and scientists and saints long after.
Governments need armies to protect them against their enslaved and oppressed subjects.
Governments need armies to protect them against their enslaved and oppressed subjects.
The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no read more
The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.
Where does virgin wool come from? The sheep that runs the fastest.
Where does virgin wool come from? The sheep that runs the fastest.
They who have reasoned ignorantly, or who have aimed at effecting their personal ends by flattering the popular feeling, have read more
They who have reasoned ignorantly, or who have aimed at effecting their personal ends by flattering the popular feeling, have boldly affirmed that "one man is as good as another;" a maxim that is true in neither nature, revealed morals, nor political theory.
Every St. Patrick's Day every Irishman goes out to find another Irishman to make a speech to.
Every St. Patrick's Day every Irishman goes out to find another Irishman to make a speech to.
