The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. read more

The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous.

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.

What doth it profit a man if he gains the who world and loses his own soul?

What doth it profit a man if he gains the who world and loses his own soul?

The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of read more

The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.

Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical read more

Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

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.

The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think read more

The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible.

Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems read more

Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach. A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed. De Tocqueville in his researches into the state of society in France before the revolution was struck by the discovery that "in no one of the periods which have followed the Revolution of 1789 has the national prosperity of France augmented more rapidly than it did in the twenty years preceding that event." He is forced to conclude that "the French found their position the more intolerable the better it became.