Quine on Cultural Relativism: Truth, says the cultural relativist, is culture-bound. But if it were, then he, within his own culture, ought to see his own culture-bound truth as absolute. He cannot proclaim cultural relativism without rising above it, and he cannot rise above it without giving it up. [Willard Van Orman Quine, "On empirically equivalent systems of the world," Erkenntnis, Vol. 9 (1975), pp. 327-8 (pp. 313-28).]

Roger Sperry on Reductionism: We no longer seek ultimate nature of reality within the smallest physical elements, nor in their innermost essence. Instead the search is redirected to focus primarily on the patterning of the elements, on their differential pacing and timing and the progressive compounding of patterns of patterns, and on their evolving nature and complexity. (American Psychologist, Vol. 50, No. 7, 506) 

John O'Brien: "The desire of one man to live on the fruits of another's labor is the original sin of the world." [George Seldes, ed., The Great Thoughts (Ballentine Books, 19850, p. 314] 

Rand on Human Nature: "Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men: living in a human society is his proper way of life - but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreement they entered)." ["A Nation's Unity," Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. II, 2, p. 3.] 

Alexis de Tocqueville on business: "The transactions of business opened a new road to power, and the financier rose to a station of political influence in which he was at once flattered and despised." [Democracy in America, p. xxxvi] 

Jostein Gaarner on the supernatural: "So you don't believe in anything supernatural then." "We've already talked about that. Even the term 'supernatural' is a curious one. No, I suppose I believe that there is only one nature. But that, on the other hand, is absolutely astonishing." (Sophie's World, p. 360) 

Arthur Miller on salesmen: His was a salesman's profession, if one may describe such dignified slavery as a profession…("In Memoriam," The New Yorker, December 25, 1995 & January 1, 1996) 

Business Besmirched: In 1769 [Benjamin] Franklin had written to his friend Henry Home, Lord Cames, the Scottish jurist and philosopher: `There seems to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second is by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way....'"[from Forest MacDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum] 

Ayn Rand on Value: Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of "value" is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of "life." To speak of "value" as apart from "life" is worse than a contradiction in terms. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. . . .In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality [i.e., who pose the "is/ought" gap problem], let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life . . . .The fact that a living entity is determines that it ought to do. [The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet Books, 1967), pp. 15-17] 

Karl Popper: I think that values enter the world with life; and if there is life without consciousness (as I think there may well be, even in animals and man, for there appears to be such a thing as dreamless sleep) then, I suggest, there will also be objective values, even without consciousness. [Karl Popper, Unending Quest (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1974), p. 194]

Positive Rights: Socialist rights are more positive, less dependent on the activation of the right-holder, more directed toward the protection and furtherance of those concerns which express the needs of active and creatively productive social beings than is the case with capitalist rights. Socialist rights are more organizational than political in that they inform the co-operative social effort rather than represent demands to be disputed and traded-off against each other. They are devices to secure the benefits which can be derived from harmonious communal living, not protections for the individual against the predations of others. Socialist rights are highly dependent on others fulfilling their correlative obligations, but are not conditional on the right-holders fulfilling their own obligations, although in practice socialist rights and socialist duties tend to coalesce, as in the case of the right and duty to work. [Tom Campbell, The Left and Rights, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 213] 

Communists and Nazis: [There is] the profound difference between Marxists, who identified with the weak and spoke the language of social justice, and fascists, who identified with an elite and spoke the language of racism and violence. [Victor Navasky, Naming Names, p. 411] 
 

Willard Gaylin on the Individual: We have created an artifact, the isolated self, that does not exist in biological truth. (On Being and Becoming Human [New York: Penguin Books, 1991]) 

Graham Greene on Altruism: None of us has a right to forget anyone. Except ourselves. Loser Takes All [Penguin, 1993, p. 51] 

Dick Francis on Business ethics: There was no particular secret, as far as I knew, about where the finance for Sandcastle had come from, but it was up to Oliver Knowels to reveal it, not me. I thought Calder would have been interested, but bankers' ethics as usually kept me quiet. [Dick Francis, Banker, Putnam, 1982, p. 106] 

Shirley Christian on Marxist Imperialism: Internationalism--the assistance of fellow revolutionaries--is a key element of the faith to Marxist-Leninists, and telling them not to practice it is like telling priests not to pray. [Shirley Christian, The Atlantic, August 1983, p. 20] 

The Folly of Intuitionism: To us today the revelation of the legal murders and cruelties connected with the trial of children are revolting. We have become so habituated to the kindly and even anxious atmosphere of the Children's Courts, that it is hard to believe that the full ceremonial, the dread ordeal, of the Assize Courts could have been brought into use against little children of seven years and upwards--judges uttering their cruel legal platitudes; the chaplain sitting by assenting; the Sheriff in his impressive uniform; ladies coming to the Court to be entertained by such a sight--the spectacle of a terrified little child about to receive the death sentence which the verdict of 12 men, probably fathers of families themselves, had given the judge power to pass. [Ernest W. Pettifer, Punishments of Former Days (East Ardsley, England: EP Publishing, Ltd., 1974), pp. 35-6] 

F. A. Hayek on prices: [Hayek notes] how little the individual participants need know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movements of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement. [F. A. Hayek, Individualism & Economic Order, pp. 86-7] 

Socrates on Reason: Not for the first time, but always, I am the sort of person who is persuaded by nothing in me except the proposition which seems to me the best when I reason about it. [Socrates] 

Mill on Radical ideas: Every great movement must experience three stages: Ridicule, discussion, adoption. [J.S. Mill] 

Homo economicus: It is a basic dictum of economic theory that all economic agents, including consumers, act to improve their "utility" or self-assessed well-being. Nicholas Eberstadt, "Are smokers rational?" The Public Interest, No. 111 (Spring 1993), p. 109. 

On the homo economicus conception of human behavior: The private interest is whatever it is that drives an individual. [Milton Friedman, "The Line we Dare Not Cross," Encounter, November 1976, p. 11]

Andrei Gromyko on human rights: Human Rights! New York is where you should look for violations. There, the people have to sleep on the sidewalks and sift through garbage cans. [Quoted in Time 6/25/84 p. 23]

The New Testament on fairness: The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them 'You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.' So they went. He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, 'Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?' 'Because no one has hired us,' they answered. He said to them, 'You also go and work in my vineyard.' When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, 'Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going to the first.' The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the land-owner. 'These men who were hired last worked only one hour,' they said, 'and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.' But he answered one of them, 'Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?' So the last will be first, and the first will be last. [Matthew 20] 

Emerson on freedom Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free....The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Fate"] 

On positive liberty: We shall probably all agree that freedom, rightly understood, is the greatest of blessings; that its attainment is the true end of all our efforts as citizens. But when we thus speak of freedom, we should consider carefully what we mean by it. We do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion. We do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespective of what it is that we like. We do not mean a freedom that can be enjoyed by one man or one set of men at the cost of a loss of freedom to others. When we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others. We mean by it a power which each man exercises through the help or security given him by his fellow-men, and which he in turn helps to secure for them. When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves ... [T. H. Green, "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract," in B. J. Diggs, ed., The State, Justice, and the Common Good (Glenville, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1974), originally published in 1881, p. 215] 

On State Ownership: . . . in a society where everything is nationalised and is the property of the state, anybody can be expropriated and subject to export. The East German Minister of Culture once announced in Leipzig that "Unsere Literatur gehort uns (Our literature belongs to us!) . . . ." What he meant was that it didn't belong to you, or to some "common national culture of two separate states (which the DDR's constitution still mentions), most certainly not to the shared language or the outside world. In Germany the phrase for chattel slaves or indentured servants was Leibeigenen, for the bodies belonged to their owners; now we have the new concept of Geisteigene, for minds and spirits are also part of the new social property relations. When a bureaucracy considers itself to be the owner of literature, then it has the absolute personal right not only to cultivate its own garden but also to remove ruthlessly such weeds as it deems harmful. [Francois Bondy, "European Diary, Exist This Way," Encounter, 4/81, pp. 42-3] 

Adam Smith on virtue: Ancient moral philosophy proposed to investigate wherein consisted the happiness and perfection of a man, considered not only as an individual, but as the member of a family, of a state, and of the great society of mankind. In that philosophy the duties of human life were treated of as subservient to the happiness and perfection of human life. But when moral, as well as natural philosophy, came to be taught only as subservient to theology, the duties of human life were treated of as chiefly subservient to the happiness of a life to come. In the ancient philosophy the perfection of virtue was represented as necessarily productive to the person who possessed it, of the most perfect happiness in this life. In the modern philosophy it was frequently represented as almost always inconsistent with any degree of happiness in this life, and heaven was to be earned by penance and mortification, not by the liberal, generous, and spirited conduct of a man. By far the most important of all the different branches of philosophy became in this manner by far the most corrupted. [The Wealth of Nations, Modern Library Edition, page 726] 

Adam Smith on morality: It is not the love of our neighbour, it is not the love of mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues. It is a stronger love, a more powerful love, which generally takes place upon such occasions: the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own character. [The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Classics, 1759, 1976), Pt. III, Ch. 3, p. 235.] 

Social Sciences: . . . There is a growing dissatisfaction throughout these disciplines [the social sciences . . . sociology, economics, political sciences, and psychology], a sense that time-honored methods and assumptions, based largely on the natural sciences, are conceptually and morally bankrupt and need to be replaced by more sophisticated models. After so many failed prophecies, so much trivial research, and so little progress toward the discovery of the "laws" of social behavior, the refrain with which conventional empirical studies typically end--"More research is needed"-- is beginning to sound hollow indeed. Hillary Putnam of Harvard, once a champion of a more traditional notion of scientific knowledge, is one of a number of philosophers who now question the very idea of a social science. We would do better, he says, to talk more modestly of "the social studies." [Louis A. Sass, "Anthropology's Native Problems," Harper's Magazine, May '86, p. 50] 

Positive Freedom: The highest type of freedom--freedom in the ethical sphere--is the guidance of one's actions by the living, actual principles of one's community, clearly understood and deliberately accepted, and in secure confidence that other community members will act in the same way. [Z. A. Pelczynski, "The Hegelian Conception of the State," in Z. A. Pelczynski, ed., Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 9] 

Property Rights and Morality: Of course, in a world in which many people coexist, and which, partly because of the fact, exhibits the phenomenon of scarcity, there is no possibility of respecting another unless one can define both oneself and the other, at least in the sense of the ability to determine where the one ends and the other begins. In verbal communication the boundary is obvious enough: people are biologically distinct entities. But in other sorts of interaction the situation is different: people use many "things" that are not part of their biological organism, and when they use them they turn them into means for the realization of their purposes--they bestow a meaning on them (grain becomes food, clay becomes building material, and so on). But many different people could use the same "thing" as means for many different and incompatible purposes. (Does the grain become food for human beings or for someone's collection of exotic birds? Does it become "my food" or "your food"?) In order to respect others as rational agents we must know the distinction between "mine" and "thine." [Frank Van Dun, "Economics and the Limits of Value-Free Science," Reason Papers, No. 11 (Spring 1986), p. 27] 

Economics and Morality: To explain economics and then withhold moral judgments seems to me to be wrong. You leave a conflict between law and economics unresolved. The parallel with biology isn't fair. Biology doesn't purport to deal with human behavior, and economics does claim to explain such behavior. It deals not with cells or stones but with human beings, and human beings have moral components. Your philosophy doesn't accommodate those components. [Judge Harold Leventhal, District of Columbia, quoted in "Judges Discover the World of Economics," by Walter Guzzardi, Jr., Fortune, May 21, 1979, p. 60] 

Milton Friedman: . . . every individual serves his own private interest . . . . The great Saints of history have served their 'private interest' just as the most money grubbing miser has served his interest. The private interest is whatever it is that drives an individual. "The Line We Dare Not Cross," Encounter, 11/76:11 

Gary Becker: The combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly, form the heart of the economic approach as I see it. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior [U. of Choice Press, 1976] 

George Stigler: . . . Man is eternally a utility-maximizer--in his home, in his office (be it public or private), in his church, in his scientific work--in short, everywhere. Lecture II, Tanner Lectures, Harvard University, April 1980. In Richard McKenzie, The Limits of Economic Science [Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff Publ., 1983], p. 6. 

James Buchanan: . . . once the body politic begins to get overly concerned about the distribution of the pie under existing property-rights assignments and legal rules, once we begin to think either about the personal gains from law-breaking, privately or publicly, or about the disparities between existing imputations and those estimated to be forthcoming under some idealized anarchy, we are necessarily precluding and forestalling the achievement of potential structural changes that might increase the size of the pie for all. Too much concern for [distributive] "justice" acts to insure that "growth" will not take place, and for reasons much more basic than the familiar economic incentives arguments. [Reason Papers, 1975] 
Politicians and bureaucrats are seen as ordinary persons, and "politics" is viewed as a set of arrangements, a game if you will, in which many players with quite disparate objectives interact so as to generate a set of outcomes that may not be either internally consistent or efficient. ["Why Governments 'Got Out of Hand'," New York Times, October 26, 1986] 

Ludwig von Mises: Human action is necessarily always rational.... When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man.... No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented. [Human Action, p. 19] 

E. J. Mishan: [the criticism] would be more compelling . . . if the declared aim of [e.g.,] a Communist regime were that of simulating the free market in order to produce much the same assortment of goods. We should bear in mind, however, that the economic objectives of a Communist government include that of deliberately reducing the amounts of consumer goods which would have been produced in a market economy so as to release resources for a more rapid build-up of basic industries. (E. J. Mishan, "Fact, Faith, & Myth, Changing Concepts of the Free Market," Encounter [November 1986], p. 66.) 

Murray N. Rothbard: "There is no distributional process apart from the production and exchange processes of the market; hence the very concept of 'distribution' becomes meaningless on the free market. Since 'distribution' is simply the result of the free exchange process, and since this process benefits all participants on the market and increases social utility, it follows directly that the 'distributional' results of the free market also increase social utility." "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics," in Mary Sennholz, ed., On Freedom and Free Enterprise [New York: Van Nostrand, 1965], p. 251. 

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega: I always think of freedom in the plural. Freedom is for the people here, not for the individual. Freedom has an integral character linking the individual to the group. It is not simply what the individual feels, it is the action of the individual within society which organizes the rights of each to the benefit of all. Society limits, of course, those aspects of individual freedom that go against the common effort in all phases of life. [Quoted in Peter Davis, Where is Nicaragua? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).] 

Judge Robert Bork, on the First Amendment: Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political. There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic. Moreover, within that category of speech we ordinarily call political, there should be no constitutional obstruction to laws making criminal any speech that advocates forcible overthrow of the government or the violation of any law. ["Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems," Indiana Law Journal, vol. 47 (1971), pp. 20 ff.] 

Judge Robert Bork's definition of "explicit political speech": Speech concerned with governmental behavior, policy, or personnel, whether the governmental unit involved is executive, legislative, judicial or administrative. . . . Explicitly political speech is speech about how we are governed, and that category therefore includes a wide range of evaluation, criticism, electioneering, and propaganda. . . . It does not cover scientific, educational, commercial, or literary expressions as such. . . . [A novel] may have impact upon attitudes that affect politics, but it would not for that reason receive judicial protection. [Ibid., p. 28] 

Bill of Rights: The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the Courts. One's right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections. [U. S. Supreme Court in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)] 

Holmes on Economic Liberty and the Constitution: "The 14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics" [Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45 (1905)], meaning, of course, that the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment was not intended to apply to economic liberty, including freedom of contract. 

Individualism: Western individualism is . . .far from expressing the common experience of humanity. Taking a world view, one might almost regard it as an eccentricity among cultures. [Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 2] 

Karl Marx on Individualism: [t]he further back we go into history, the more the individual, and, therefore, the producing individual seems to depend on and belong to a larger whole: at first it is, quite naturally, the family and the clan, which is but an enlarged family; later on, it is the community growing up in its different forms out of the clash and the amalgamation of claims. It is only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', that the different forms of social union confront the individual as a mere means to his private ends, as an external necessity. [Karl Marx, Grudrisse, p. 17] 

Christian Wholism: ... every part of the community belongs to the whole ... [St. Augustine, quoted in Thomas Beuchamp, ed., Ethical Issues in Death & Dying, Englewood-Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984, p. 103.]

Hobbesian Ideas Today: Deep thinkers who look everywhere for the mysterious causes of poverty, ignorance, crime and war need look no further than their own mirrors. We are all born into this world poor and ignorant, and with thoroughly selfish and barbaric impulses. Those of us who turn out any other way do so largely through the efforts of others who civilized us before we got big enough to do too much damage to the world and ourselves. But for these efforts, we might well be on welfare or in the penitentiary. [Thomas Sowell, Quoted in "The Help That is Self-Sown," Inquiry, December 21, 1987.] 

Self-Defeating Capitalism: We are very poor guardians of our own liberties .... [Liberalism's] minimalist view of civic obligation [and the] dangerous privatization [of certain values of Western civilization]. [Quentin Skinner in "The Paradoxes of Political Liberty," in Sterling M. McMurrin, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 225-50.] 
 

On private property: As a presidential candidate, [Colonel Jacobo] Arbenz had gone so far as to suggest that some of the land [42% of which in Guatemala was owned by the United Fruit Company] might be sold back to the Guatemalan people at the price per acre established by the United Fruit Company's own tax lawyers. In Washington the suggestion was received as an insult tantamount to a declaration of war. The Americans were willing to put up with almost anything, but not with the blasphemy of land reform. Land reform called into doubt the American belief in the sacred nature of private property. Private property was what democracy was all about, as fundamental to the orderly workings of the universe as the corn harvest or the rain. [Lewis H. Lapham, "Quetzal," Harper's Magazine, Feb. 1989, p. 9] 
 

On Science and Free will: There exists within the cranium a whole world of diverse causal forces, as in no other cubic half-foot of universe that we know.... [and] if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those overall organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patters overall cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity.... 

Communist Tactics, Lenin: [T]he kind of determinism proposed is not that of the atomic, molecular, or cellular level, but rather the kind that prevails at the level of cerebral mentation, involving the interplay of ideas, reasoning processes, judgments, emotion, insight, and so forth. [Roger W. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority (Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 33-34, 39] Communist Tactics: Only one thing is needed to enable us to march forward more surely and more firmly to victory: namely, the full and complete thought of our appreciation by all communists in all countries of the necessity of displaying the utmost flexibility in their tactics. The strictest loyalty to the ideas of communism must be combined with the ability to make all the necessary practical compromises, to attack, to make agreements, zigzags, retreats, etc. [Lenin, "Left Wing Communism," 1920]. 

Communist Tactics, Manuilski: War between Communism and Capitalism: War to the hilt between communism and capitalism is inevitable, Today, of course, we are not strong enough to attack. Our time will come in 30 to 40 years. To win, we shall need the element of surprise. The western world will have to be put to sleep. So we shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There shall be electrifying overtures and unheard of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we shall smash them with our clenched fist. [Dimitry Manuilski, Lenin School of Political Warfare, Moscow, 1930, Quoted in W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist, from a letter by Joseph Z. Kornfeder to Dr. J. D. Bales.] 

Austrian Subjective Values by Don Bellante: The Austrian approach is most distinct from mainstream economics in its thorough emphasis on the individual decision maker as the focus of scientific analysis. Yet with the values and motives of individuals being entirely subjective it is impossible for an analyst to pass judgment on the optimality of the individual's chosen actions. ["Subjective value theory & government intervention in the Labor Market," Austrian Economics Newsletter, Spring/Summer 1989, pp. 1-2.] 

On reason: He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave. [Sir William Drummond, Academical Questions] 

On Liberty: Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth. [George Washington, Maxims of Washington] 

August Comte On Altruism: "[The] social point of view ... cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service.... This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely." August Comte, Cathechisme positiviste (Paris: Temple de l'humanite, 1957).

Pablo Picasso: "I'd like to live like a poor man, only with lots of money." 

Michael de Montaigne:  "Aristippus championed only the body, as though we had no soul, Zeno championed only the soul, as though we had no body. Both were flawed." 

"May Philosophy's followers, faced with breaking their wife's hymen, be no more erect, muscular, nor succulent than her arguments are!"

"It is an error to reckon some function to be less worthy because they are necessities. They will never beat it out of my head that the marriage of Pleasure to Necessity ... is a most suitable match." 

"And the most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being."
 

Hegel on Altruism? The world process was supposed to be the perversion of the good, because it took individuality for its principle ....The world process transmutes and perverts the unchangeable, but does so in fact by transforming it out of the nothingness of abstraction into the being of reality. The course of the world is, then, victorious over what, in opposition to it, constitutes virtue; it is victorious over that which took an unreal abstraction to be the essential reality. But it is not victorious over something real, but over the production of distinctions that are no distinctions, over this pompous talk about the best for mankind and the oppression of humanity, about sacrifice for goodness' sake and the misuse of gifts. Imaginary idealities and purposes of that sort fall on the ear as idle phrases, which exalt the heart and leave the reason blank, which edify but build up nothing that endures; declamations whose only definite announcement is that the individual who professes to act for such noble ends and indulges in such fine phrases holds himself for a fine creature; a swollen inflation with emptiness. [Phenomenology, trns. Baillie, p. 409] 

Hegel on Feelings: Since the man of common sense appeals to his feeling, to an oracles within his breast, he is done with any one who does not agree. He has just to explain that he has no more to say to any one who does not find and feel the same as himself. In other words, he tramples the roots of humanity underfoot. For the nature of humanity is to impel men to agree with one another, and its very existence lies simply in the explicit realization of a community of conscious life. What is anti-human, the condition of mere animals, consists in keeping within the sphere of feeling pure and simple, and in being able to communicate only by way of feeling-states.[Phenomenology, p. 127] 

Cloriss Lamont: It is essential to recognize that freedom of choice is inextricably bound up with the human capacity for thought. The word intelligence originates from the Latin "inter" (between) and "legere" (to choose). Choosing means making up one's mind." ("Free Choice and Naturalism: A Written Exchange," The Humanist, May/June 1990, p. 18.) 

Thomas W. Clark: The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.....The human will is simply the dynamic urge to carry out wishes and ideas that have become part of our being though the impact of the total cause-effect necessities both within us and without us. (Ibid., p. 19) 

Kennan on Sexuality in humans: There is no getting around it: we have to do here with a compulsion we share with the lowest and least attractive of the mammalian and reptile species. It invites most handsomely, and very often deserves, the ridicule, the furtive curiosity, and the commercial exploitation it receives. To highly sensitive people, it can become a never-ending source of embarrassment and humiliation, of pain to its immediate victims and to others, of misunderstandings, shame, and remorse all around. Not for nothing do the resulting tragedies dominate so much of realistic as well as of romantic literature. Not for nothing has this urge earned the prominent place it takes in the religious rites of confession and prayers for forgiveness. There is, in short, no escaping it: the sexual urge, the crude expression of nature's demand for the proliferation of the species, enriching, confusing, and tragedizing the human predicament as it does at every turn, must be regarded as a signal imperfection in man's equipment to lead life in the civilized context. It cannot be expected to be otherwise at any time in the foreseeable future. (George F. Kennan, Man, The Cracked Vessel [New York: W. W. Norton, 1993], pp. 19-20.) 

Aristotle on Self-Love: "Therefore the good man should be a lover of self (for he will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows), but the wicked man should not." (Nicomachean Ethics 1169a12) 
 

Maclagan: "'Altruism' [is] assuming a duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our fellows....Altruism is to ... maintain quite simply that a man may and should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness as such when he is deciding what course of action to pursue." (pp. 109-110). As presented in ordinarily, by ministers or priests or in fiction, altruism means ranking looking out for others in first place in one's list of moral duties.. W. G. Maclagan, "Self and Others: A Defense of Altruism," Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1954): 109-127. 

Stephen Hawking on Free Will & Determinism ... the doctrine of diminished responsibility: the idea that a person should not be punished for their actions because they were under stress. It may be that someone is more likely to commit an antisocial act when under stress. But that does not mean that we should make it even more likley that he or she commit the act by reducing the punishment. [Black Holes and Baby Universes and other essays, New York: Bantam Books, 1993, pp. 123-4] 

In summary, the title of this essay was a question: is everything determined? The answer is yes, it is. But it might as well not be, because we can never know what is determined. [ibid., p. 126] 

William Pitt (younger) on "necessity": Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. [Speech on the India Bill, Nov. 1783]

"A cheap pawnbroker or a multimillionaire businessman ... they are both blood suckers." Fernando Rey's character Don Lope in Luis Bunuel's film, Tristana (1970) 

"There's never been a problem yet I couldn't solve by thinking. I just don't usually choose to think." Tim Sandlin, Sex and Sunsets, p. 255. 

"'O Cormac, grandson of Conn,' said Carbery, 'what is the sweetest thing you have heard?' 'Not hard to tell,' said Cormac. 'The shout of triumph after victory, Praise after wages, A lady's invitation to her pillow.' [from THE INSTRUCTIONS OF KING CORMAC, early 9th century] 

"Judgment is something that is entirely yours; it is an element in personal commitment in an extremely pure state. Because it is so personal, so much an expression of one's own reasonableness apart from any constraint, because all alternatives are provided for, it is entirely one's own responsibility. Because it is entirely one's own responsibility, one does not complain about one's bad judgments ; one is responsible for them." Bernard J. F. Lonegran, Understanding and Being, Edwin Mellen Press, 1980, p.113; cf. p, 124] 

Dick Francis on Loners: ….In Britain the word "loner" flew none of the danger signals it did over in the United States, where the desirability of being "one of a team" was indoctrinated from preschool. "Loners" here, I'd discovered, were people who went off their heads….[To the Hilt, p. 22] 

Dick Francis on legislation:  "Patsy was right, of course, but predictably (like most legislation) she achieved the opposite result of that intended…" [To the Hilt, p. 249] 

Fareed Zakaria on democracy: "Democracy without constitutional liberalism is not simply inadequate, but dangerous, bringing with it the erosion of liberty, the abuse of power, ethnic divisions, and even war. Eighty years ago, Woodrow Wilson took America into the twentieth century with a challenge, to make the world safe for democracy. As we approach the next century, our task is to make democracy safe for the world." ["The Rise of Illiberal Democracy" Foreign Affairs, Fall 1997]

Tibor Machan on Necessary Existence: Things -- whatever -- can exist pretty adequately without having to exist necessarily; nor is our inability to prove their necessary existence any kind of liability, unless we are dealing with things -- whatever -- for which necessary existence or necessity is an (ontological) requirement (say the laws of logic). [Tibor Machan, 11/18/97] 

Susan Wolf on Moral Sainthood: By moral saint I mean a person whose every action is as morally good as possible, a person, that is, who is as morally worthy as can be….A necessary condition of moral saint-hood would be that one's life be dominated by a commitment to improving the welfare of others or of society was a whole. [Quoted in Robin Wang, "The Principle of Humanity: An Alternative Perspective on Contemporary Moral Issues."] 

William Greider on the Anti-capitalism of novelists: The heavy novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy and others [consider Cather, Fitzgerald, and their contemporaries] told, over and over in different story forms, the same moral tragedy: innocent Americans who left their simple country past for the dangerous excitement of the city, where they were ensnared by a brutal new system of economic organization, forced to cooperate with it, robbed of their native virtue. Novelists in America have never reconciled themselves to the terms of the modern economic system. They remain hostile to it and pessimistic, mocking the values of corporate bureaucracy, lamenting the soul-deadening materialism. Instead, literature and popular culture continue to celebrate what seems lost the free ranging individualism ... the idyll of self-reliance. [William Greider, Secret of the Temple: How The Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Touchstone, 1987).] 

Daniel Webster on good intentions and government: Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of power. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. [Daniel Webster, quoted in Hearings on the confirmation of Abe Fortas to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, p. 108]

Lord Salisbury on the blow up fallacy: You should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense. [Lord Salisbury] 

Adam Smith about collusion: People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary." Wealth of Nations, p. 144 - 1976 edition

Thomas Reid on arguing for the obvious: [W]hen we attempt to prove by direct argument, what is really self-evident, the reasoning will always be inconclusive; for it will either take for granted the thing to be proved, or something not more evident; and so, instead of giving strength to the conclusion, will rather tempt those to doubt of it, who never did so before. [Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind]

William Graham Sumner on Morality: All notions of propriety, decency, chastity, politeness, order, duty, right, rights, discipline, respect, reverence, cooperation, and fellowship, especially all things in regard to which good and ill depend entirely on the point at which the line is drawn, are in the mores. The mores can make things seem right and good to one group or one age which to another seem antagonistic to every instinct of human nature….[Folkways, NY: Ginn and Company, 1907, "Cultural Relativism," p. 55] 
 

God & Goodness: "If in ascribing goodness to God I do not mean what I mean by goodness, if I do not mean the goodness of which I have some knowledge, but an incomprehensible attribute of an incomprehensible substance, which for aught I know may be a totally different quality from that which I love and venerate…what do I mean by calling it goodness? and what reason have I for venerating it? If I know nothing about what the attribute is, I cannot tell that it is a proper object of veneration. To say that God's goodness may be different in kind from man's goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good? To assert in words what we do not think in meaning, is as suitable a definition as can be given of a moral falsehood." (Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy; quoted in J. Hospers, Introd. to Philosophical Analysis, along with extended discussion of evil and omnipotence, etc.) 

Peter McWilliams on advocating consensualism: One of the fears about discussing consensual activities is that if you defend a certain practice, you're often accused of being or doing that. Well, if you're wondering about me, why not assume that I do it all? Yes, just presume that I am a drug-selling homosexual prostitute gambler who drunkenly loiters all day with my six wives and four husbands, making and watching pornography while being treated by strange medical practices and running a cult on the side. You can also assume my motives to be the darkest, most selfish, and pernicious you can imagine. No matter how many times I say that I'm not advocating any of the consensual crimes, someone will, of course, accuse me of 'recruiting' for them all. It's a classic example of projection: the religions that believe most in vigorous proselytizing are the same ones that accuse others of recruiting. What they call 'witnessing' and 'testifying' - hence God's work - becomes 'recruitment' and 'brainwashing' when used by others, hence the work of the devil. From (Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do [1993, p.17]) 

John Locke on Choosing to Think: "[T]hough we cannot hinder our knowledge where the agreement is once perceived, nor our assent, where the probability manifestly appears upon due consideration of all the measures of it; yet we can hinder both knowledge and assent, by stopping our inquiry, and not employing our faculties in the search of any truth. If it were not so, ignorance, error, or infidelity, could not in any case be a fault." John Locke, Essay in Human Understanding, Book IV, xx, 16. 

The RC Message: "[The priest] was speaking so slowly and with such passion that, although I know little French, I understood half of what he said and the purport of all of it, which was simply that because Christ loved us enough to die for us, we must follow his example and love one another, for therein lies our salvation." (Anthony Brandt, "Rome," Sky, July 1998, p. 39) 
 

Machan on Blaming: Blaming is a kind of (morally focused) factual ascription of responsibility of untoward deeds that have been volitionally undertaken. Tibor Machan 

George Santayana on Uniformity: "There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.'' George Santayana, from The Life of Reason (NY: Scribners, 1905-06), vol. 2, p. 90. 
 

Weinberg on Determinism: "The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather….I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years." Steven Weinberg, "A Designer Universe?" the New York Review of Books, VolXLVI, No. 16 (October 21, 1999), p.46. 

Nagel on Ideas: In contrast, consider the following understanding of the ways of ideas: "…political philosophy, when it has an impact on the world, affects the world only indirectly, through the gradual penetration, usually over generations, of questions and arguments from abstruse theoretical writings into the consciousness and the habits of thought of educated persons, and from there into political and legal arguments and eventually into the structure of alternatives among which political and practical choices are actually made." (Thomas Nagel, "Justice, Justice, Shalt Thou Pursue, The rigorous compassion of John Rawls" The New Republic (October 25, 1999), pp. 36-37. 

Joseph on Cause: The underlying metaphysics here is laid out by H. W. B. Joseph in his An Introduction to Logic (Oxford University Press, 1906), pp. 401ff. Joseph calls attention to the idea that causes are beings or entities in, for example, the following passage: "…the earth is not more antecedent than consequent in time to the movement of a pendulum which it attracts; and oxygen and hydrogen are ingredients necessary to the formation of water, but they do not happen like their combination. Cause no doubt implies change and succession. But there can be no change without something which changes, i .e., which persists through a succession of states." (p. 405) 

Silvan Tomkins on infantile experience: We are indebted to Freud for the rediscovery of our infantile experience. . . . he exaggerated the "infantile" characteristics of this early experience. Freud the moralist was not prepared to tolerate in adults_//-either the early self-love or the early dependence on the oceanic union with the mother. These earlier modes, claustral and pre-verbal, are we think important components of all human experience, early and late. To insist as Freud did on the necessity of their later transformation and subordination to adult modes of communion is to impoverish the personality of the adult and to interpret reality in accordance with the heart's desire when it is the heart of an over-individuated and somewhat alienated human being. it is not unlike the disdain of a gourmet for the simple palate of the infant, his live of milk to relieve his thirst and hunger pangs. The simple oral pleasures of the young are never outgrown, though they may be masked and overgrown. The human animal will always be capable of intense satisfaction from water or milk when thirst or hunger mounts. Nor is the satisfaction of the adult inherently different than that of the infant in this respect. What distinguishes early and later taste are the later transformations and discriminations of the more learned palate of the adult. But these do not require us to subordinate the early pleasures to the late in adult orality nor require that we reject these early pleasures either as perverse or infantile. They are rather the simple pleasures of both the young and the old. So it is also with the affect of enjoyment. [Silvan Tomkins and is taken from Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds. With a biographical sketch by Irving E. Alexander. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 89-90. The symbol "_//-" marks the page break.] 

Spencer on Poverty: Sympathy with one in suffering suppresses, for the time being, remembrance of his transgressions….Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclamations in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged; and non of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their own misdeeds.(Man versus the State, p.22) 

Rorty on ethics: Non-metaphysicians [of whom Rorty and, by his account, all other wise men are members] cannot say that democratic institutions reflect a moral reality and that tyrannical regimes do not reflect one, that tyrannies get something wrong that democratic societies get right. (Richard Rorty, "The Seer of Prague," The New Republic, July 1, 1991, pp. 35-40.) 

Nussbaum on Libertarianism: "A simple 'get the state off our backs' position may look attractive when we are thinking about the sexlives of middle-class men, but it is clearly inadequate to deal with the situation of women and other vulnerable groups. There is no consent where there is pervasive intimidation and hierarchy." Martha C. Nussbaum, "Experiments in Living (Review of Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal)," The New Republic, January 3, 2000, p. 33. 

Aquinas on Free Will: "[M]an acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. And forasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have a free-will." (Summa Theologica, Q. 93.) 

Adam Smith on Market Motivation: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We Address ourselves, not to their humanity but of their advantages." Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Liberty Classics, page 26-27. 

Machan on the “blow up fallacy”: [This] consists, first, in making diligent inquiries into some aspect of reality and arriving at significant, often true, and, at times, startling conclusions, including principles by which we can best understand what happens in the area being studied. But then an entirely unjustified turn is taken. The conclusions and principles are lifted out of the special field and imported into some other area. The picture taken in the special domain is blown up with the intent to offer us an understanding of much more, and sometimes all, of reality. The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (Arlington House, 1974), p. 52)

Rights as Powers:
"If one comes to believe with Bentham that a right without the power adequate to its exercise is really a nonentity, a mere philosophical fiction, it is but a short step to believe that 'adequate power' is the real ground of right in society and to contend that the advancement of rights is at bottom the pretension of those who have or who seek the resources to promote their own interests and to prevail over others."  William Augustus Banner,  Moral Norms and Moral Order (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 1981), p. 98.

I can indeed be constrained by others to perform actions that are directed as a means to an end, but I can never be constrained by others to have an end; only I myself can make something my end. (Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans., M. Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p.381.)

Machan On Prudence:
I have been saying that the moral virtue of prudence, understood roughly along Aristotelian lines, gives moral backing to the activities involved in commerce and business.  By "prudence" I have in mind "practical wisdom," which Aristotle says "must be a reasoned and  true capacity to act with regard to human goods."  But I also argue that the content of practical wisdom will depend in part on what human goods are, which in turn will depend on human nature.  If we understand  human beings to be not only rational beings but rational animals, and  if we understand their nature to be our guide, not only their distinctive essence (rationality), then practical wisdom will have to attend to human economic and related concerns.  This is because our animality will be significantly determinate of the human goods we ought to act with regard to.  And if you add to this the element of  individuality that is also defining of our human nature, the human goods in question will be, first and foremost, the goods of the human agent in question (understood, of course, broadly). [Tibor Machan]

“Everything” said Pericles, “which one man obliges another to do without gaining his consent, whether he enact it in writing or not, seems to me to be force rather than law.” Xenophon, Memorabilia, 46, from Aeon Skoble and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Political Philosophy, Essential Selections (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 3-4.

Religion and Liberty: Man cannot be forced to accept the truth. He can be drawn toward the truth only by his own nature, that is, by his own freedom . . . This has always been the teaching of the Church. Crossing the Threshold of Hope, John Paul II, (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 190

Thucydides on the commons:
[T]hey devote a very small fraction of the time to the consideration of any public object, most of it to the prosecution of their own objects.  Meanwhile, each fancies that no harm will come to his neglect, that it is the business of somebody else to look after this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately, the common cause imperceptibly decays. (Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, bk. I, sec. 141).

From individual property rights (including rights to one's own body and the fruits of one's labor) these early modern thinkers derived lessons about consent, governmental accountability, and resistance to abuses of power. Cary J. Nederman. “Political Theory and Subjective Rights in 14th Century England,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 58 (Spring 1996), p. 327.

Von Mises on Liberalism: No sect and no political party has believed that it could afford to forgo advancing its cause by appealing to men's senses. Rhetorical bombast, music and song resound, banners wave, flowers and colors serve as symbols, and the leaders seek to attach their followers to their own person. Liberalism has nothing to do with all this. It has no party flower and no party color, no party song and no party idols, no symbols and no slogans. It has the substance and the arguments. These must lead it to victory. (Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism German edition, 1927; latest English edition Copyright 1985 The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington, NY. Translation by Ralph Raico. Online edition Copyright The Mises Institute, 2000)

Charles Baudelaire on Commerce: Commerce is satanic, because it is the basest and vilest form of egoism.  The spirit of every business-man is completely depraved.  Commerce is natural, therefore shameful.
The Intimate Journals, trns. Christophere Isherwood (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). P. 51.

Ross & van den Haag on Free Will and Morality: Even if science cannot pronounce on the subject of moral conduct, it would seem to he relevant to a factual matter: Is man really free to choose? If science can answer that question, it can show whether moral conduct is possible at all. For unless men are free to choose between alternatives, they are not moral agents. Only if man is free to choose does he fulfill the necessary condition for the existence of morals. And if he is not free to choose, there can he no morals. (Ralph Ross and Ernest van den Haag, The Fabric of Society [Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1957], pp. 286.)

Roger Trigg  on Realism & Objectivity: 
"It is a paradox that man can demand the centre of the stage, insisting that everything should depend on him, and yet in the end find that in doing so he has lost his rationality and freedom.  Realism takes the possibility of error and ignorance seriously, but it also gives men the chance of notable success in extending the range of their understanding.  It gives them something to reason about, while acknowledging that they are free to make mistakes." (Reality at Risk, p. 197)

"Without objective reality, we can say nothing true, and without the possibility of truth and error, there can be no possibility of rational judgment. Without rationality, men can have no freedom of choice." (Ibid., p. 197)

Plato on self-interest:
Crito, "When you are gone, Socrates, how can we best act to please you?"  Socrates: "Just follow my old recipe, my friend: do yourselves concern yourselves with your own true self-interest; then you will oblige me, and mine and yourself too." 

Albert Einstein on Ethics:  "The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil from the spirit of man."

Luck:  "Chance favors the prepared." -- Louis Pasteur

Blaise Pascal on Thinking:
“Let us labour, then, to think well, for such is the foundation of morality.” Quoted in THE WEEK, July 27, 2002, p. 17.

Wittgenstein on being better and having a better mind:
"I am working diligently and wish I were better and had a better mind. And these both are  one and the same...." Engelmann, P., Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir. B.F. McGuinness (ed.) (Oxford 1967), S.4. [my own translation, TRM]

Machan on the human mind: “While the human mind has the remarkable capacity to be creative and inventive, it goes hand in hand with the equal capacity to produce BS to justify all kinds of rotten impulses.”  TRM

Mencius on the role of thinking: ‘Though equally human, why are some men guided one way and others guided another way?’ ‘The organs of hearing and sight are unable to think and can be misled by external things.  When one thing acts on another, all it does is attract it.  The organ of the heart [= mind] can think.  But it will find the answer only if it does think; otherwise it will not find the answer.’ -- Mencius (4th-century BC Confucian)

Greer Garson on Rights: “Why should I hate you?  You have a right to your luck, to your life.” In Desire Me (1947)

Language often obscures truth.  More than is ordinarily realized, our eyes are blinded to the facts of international relations by tricks of the tongue.  When one uses the simple monosyllable "France" one thinks of France as a unit, an entity.  When to avoid awkward repetition we use a personal pronoun in referring to a country--when for example we say "France sent her troops to conquer Tunis"--we impute not only unity but personality to the country.  The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and-blood men and women who are the true actors.  How different it would be if we had no such word as "France," and had to say instead--thirty-eight million men, women and children of very diversified interests and beliefs, inhabiting 218,000 square miles of territory!  Then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: "A few of these thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis."  This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions.  Who are the "few"?  Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis?  And why did these obey?

Empire-building is done not by "nations" but by men.  The problem before us is to discover the men, the active, interested minorities in each nation, who are directly interested in imperialism, and then to analyze the reasons why the majorities pay the expenses and fight the wars necessitated by imperialist expansion.  (Parker Thomas Moon, Imperialism and World Politics [New York: The MacMillan Company, 1930], p. 58

Murdoch on Meta-Ethics: "... I would suggest that at the level of serious common sense and of an ordinary non-philosophical reflection about the nature of morals it is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one's eyes but of a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline.
        "The place of choice is certainly a different one [from that of the existentialists] if we think in terms of a world which is compulsively present to the will, and the discernment and exploration of which is a slow business.  Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the `decision' lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be `cultivated'.  If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is ultimate condition to be aimed at.
        "Will and reason then are not entirely separate faculties in the moral agent. Will continually influences belief, for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality."  (The Sovereignty of the Good, pp38-40)

John Acton on liberty:
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare...
In every age [liberty's] progress has been beset by its natural enemies: by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power, and the poor man's craving for food.
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
Liberty is the prevention of control by others.  This requires self-control...
Liberty alone demands, for its realization, the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.
Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together.  Liberty is not a means to a higher political end.  It is itself the highest political end.  It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.
Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.
Liberty enables us to do our duty unhindered by the state, by society, by ignorance and error.  We are free in proportion as we are safe from these impediments...
...obscure ethics imply imperfect liberty.  For liberty comes not with any ethical system, but with a very developed one.
...sanctifying freedom...teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.
...by birth all men are free.
...conscience imperatively demands a corresponding measure of personal liberty...With this no human authority can be permitted to interfere.  We are bound to extend to the utmost, and to guard from every encroachment, the sphere in which we can act in obedience to the sole voice of conscience, regardless of any other consideration.
...the interest of individuals is above the exclusive interest of the state. The power of the whole is not to be set in the balance for a moment with freedom-that is, the conscience of the subject-and those who act on other principle are the worst of criminals.
It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people to govern others.  Every man is the best, the most responsible, judge of his own advantage.
The great question is to discover, not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the conscience of mankind.
The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom.
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern.  Every class is unfit to govern.
Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.
Laws are made for the public good...The public good is not to be considered, if it is purchased at the expense of an individual.
The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust.
There are many things the government can't do, many good purposes it must renounce.  It must leave them to the enterprise of others.  It cannot feed the people.  It cannot enrich the people.  It cannot teach the people.
Popular power may be tainted with the same poison as personal power.
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather if that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.
The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.
Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.
...the possession of unlimited power...corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding...
There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders...
There are principles which override precedents...there is such a thing as a higher law.
...all legislation must conform [under a law of nature]...by the voice of universal reason...a principle embracing all mankind... A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved.
W. H. Auden on altruism:
We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
(THE WEEK, Nov. 16, 2002, p. 19)

John Philpot Curran and Wendell Phillips: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  (Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), abolitionist, orator and columnist for The Liberator, paraphrasing John Philpot Curran (above) in a speech before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society in 1852, according to The Dictionary of Quotations edited by Bergen Evans.)

John Philpot Curran and Wendell Phillips: 
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  (Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), abolitionist, orator and columnist for The Liberator, paraphrasing John Philpot Curran (above) in a speech before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society in 1852, according to The Dictionary of Quotations edited by Bergen Evans.) 
Andrew Jackson: "But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing.  It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government." -- Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837 

Hazlitt on the Justice of Liberty: The superior freedom of the capitalist system, its superior justice, and its superior productivity are not three superiorities, but one.   The justice follows from the freedom and the productivity follows from the freedom and the justice. [Henry Hazlitt, quoted in The Freeman, June 1993, p. 225].

Not “Our” values: Many times in the last year we have heard: "Our values are under threat." They are; and we should--we must--defend them.  But not because they are ours; for that really would be a regression to the dark side of human nature.  If we take this thought to heart, we shall not, as we should not, fear that in defending them we may be guilty of a kind of cultural imperialism.  And we will appreciate that, in the deepest sense, the values at stake are not "ours"--not peculiarly American, English, French, or even Western, but human: values, that is, with the capacity to enhance human flourishing, and to appeal emotionally to human everywhere. [Professor Susan Haack (U. of Miami), "9/11/02," Free Inquiry, Winter 2002/03, p. 12.]

Jesus on Trade:
Then he entered the temple area and began driving out those who were selling.  “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be a house of prayer’; but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”  Bible, Luke 19:45. 

Nietzsche on Disciples:
"The first generation of disciples to any new philosophy is not a sufficient refutation of that philosophy" (attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche).

Maugham on Freedom:
"If a nation or an individual values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too." -- W. Somerset Maugham

Milton Friedman on morality:
“The liberal conceives of men as imperfect beings.  He regards the problem of social organization to be as much a negative problem of preventing ‘bad’ people from doing harm as of enabling ‘good’ people to do good; and, of course, ‘bad’ and ‘good’ people may be the same people, depending on who is judging them.” (Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, p.12) 

Friedman on Sin:
"I think that the crucial question that anybody who believes in freedom has to ask himself is whether to let another man be free to sin.  If you really know what sin is, if you could be absolutely certain that you had the revealed truth, then you could not let another man sin.  You have to stop him." "Interview with Milton Friedman," Reason, December 1974, p. 5. 

Rawls on Self-interest & Friendship:
"Among persons who never acted in accordance with their duty of justice except as reasons of self-interest and expediency dictated there would be no bonds of friendship and mutual trust." (TOJ, p. 488)

Anonymous on Democracy:
“When democracy goes against you, it’s a conspiracy; when it favors you, it’s the will of the people.”

Josephson on business ethics:
There's no such thing as business ethics; there's just ethics. And ethics makes no concessions for the real or imagined necessities of making a profit.  (Michael S. Josephson, Founder and CEO, Josephson Institute of Ethics)

Spiritualism in Bible:
If you have been raised by Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are in earth.         Colossians 3:1-4.

Alan Furst on the world:
"I had a friend, a Russian, he had theories about these things--a world of bad people and good people, a war that never seems to end, you have to take sides.  I don't know, maybe that's the way it is."  Cpt. De Milja, The Polish Officer, by Alan Furst (p. 286)

Aquinas on Free Will:
[M]an acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. And forasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have a free-will." (Summa Theologica, Q. 93.)

Montaigne on Misanthropy:
Of all our diseases, the worst is to despise our own being.

Diogenes Laertius reporting on Diogenes , the Cynic:
Once he saw the officials of a temple leading away some one who had stolen a bowl belonging to the treasurers, and said, 'The great thieves are leading away the little thief.'

Machan on gaining from bad institutions:
Getting benefits from a bad practice or institution is only wrong if one supports it and isn't willing to give it up once it is abolished. -- From "Trying to Silence the Rebels Within".
http://www.cato.org/dailys/04-02-02.html

J. S. Caldwell on Government:
The point to remember is that what Government gives it must first take away. 

George Orwell on Autobiographies:
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.  George Orwell, quoted in The [London] Sunday Times [from THE WEEK, Sept. 13, 2003, p. 17]

Barnett on the Constitution:
A constitution is legitimate and binding in conscience to the extent that it protects the natural rights of those under its jurisdiction. [Randy] Barnett: “Restoring the Constitution,” Cato Policy Report, March/April 2004, p. 3.

Susan Sontag on Communism:
I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should have understood a very long time ago: that Communism is fascism--successful fascism, if you will. What we have called fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown--that has, largely, failed. I repeat: not only is fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies--especially when their populations are moved to revolt--but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face. (“Communism and the Left” The Nation, 2-27-1982)

Chillingworth On skepticism:
No man's error can be confuted who doth not . . . grant some true principle that contradicts his error. William Chillingworth.