Notable Quotable 343

Nov 11, 2024

My rights are not up for discussion, let alone a vote, whether it be 75% of the population, the will of one king, or the whim of 100 senators.

- Michael Malice

Those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them.

- Michael Malice

Tyranny is when the population is imprisoned. Freedom when the politicians are.

- Michael Malice

To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a philautos [a lover of self], not a philosophos [a lover of wisdom].

- Arthur Schopenhauer

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

- Marcus Aurelius

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Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

- Thomas Szasz

False hopes are more dangerous than fears.

- J. R. R. Tolkien

One of the leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. Not one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.

- Edmund Burke

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

- Alexis Carrel

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

- Henry David Thoreau