We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our read more

We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.

No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law.

No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law.

Except in the sacred texts of democracy and in the incantations of orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend read more

Except in the sacred texts of democracy and in the incantations of orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force. What other virtue can there be in fifty-one percent except the brute fact that fifty-one is more than forty-nine? The rule of fifty-one per cent is a convenience, it is for certain matters a satisfactory political device, it is for others the lesser of two evils, and for others it is acceptable because we do not know any less troublesome method of obtaining a political decision. But it may easily become an absurd tyranny if we regard it worshipfully, as though it were more than a political device. We have lost all sense of its true meaning when we imagine that the opinion of fifty-one per cent is in some high fashion the true opinion of the whole hundred per cent, or indulge in the sophistry that the rule of a majority is based upon the ultimate equality of man.

For every prohibition you create you also create an underground.

For every prohibition you create you also create an underground.

If the small minority of enlightened citizens who are able to conceive sound principles of political management do not succeed read more

If the small minority of enlightened citizens who are able to conceive sound principles of political management do not succeed in winning the support of their fellow citizens and converting them to the endorsement of policies that bring and preserve prosperity, the cause of mankind and civilization is hopeless. There is no other means to safeguard a propitious development of human affairs than to make the masses of inferior people adopt the ideas of the elite. This has to be achieved by convincing them. It cannot be accomplished by a despotic regime that instead of enlightening the masses beats them into submission. In the long run the ideas of the majority, however detrimental they may be, will carry on. The future of mankind depends on the ability of the elite to influence public opinion in the right direction.

An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.

An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom read more

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

A recent conversation: Dubya: Look at the clock, time is racing! Cheney: That's the second hand, George.

A recent conversation: Dubya: Look at the clock, time is racing! Cheney: That's the second hand, George.