It is possible to lead astray an entire generation, to strike it blind, to drive it insane, to direct it read more

It is possible to lead astray an entire generation, to strike it blind, to drive it insane, to direct it towards a false goal. Napoleon proved this.

These people have served a longer sentence than some people who have committed murder.

These people have served a longer sentence than some people who have committed murder.

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

The conception that government should be guided by majority opinion makes sense only if that opinion is independent of government. read more

The conception that government should be guided by majority opinion makes sense only if that opinion is independent of government. The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to read more

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.

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.

People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that read more

People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.

We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward.

We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward.