Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

To complain of lack of leadership is, in the field of political affairs, the characteristic attitude of all harbingers of dictatorship.

I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit.

The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.

Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.

Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.

The celebration of unbounded individualism means, beyond some point, the acceptance of force- either private or public .

Freedom...refer to a social relationship among people- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.

Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.

Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.

...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption.Vitality springs from diversity- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces- alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations.

Against nature and within nature there is no freedom.

The first thing a genius needs is to breath free air.

Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars.

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

The right to be heard does not autmatically include the right to be taken seriously.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."N. B.: This quote is commonly attributed to Voltaire, but it is not found in his writing. - The Friends of Voltaire.

Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns.

For target shooting, that's okay. Get a license and go to the range. For defense of the home, that's why we have police departments.

Expecting a carjacker or rapist or drug pusher to care that his possession or use of a gun is unlawful is like expecting a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces. - "Usenet posting in talk.politics.guns".

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. - Beyond the Horizon, 1942.