>Date: Mon, 10 Jul 1995 20:49:46 -0500 (CDT)
>From: Tibor R Machan <machatr@mail.auburn.edu>
>Subject: Quotations.txt


TIBOR MACHAN'S COLLECTION OF QUOTABLE QUOTES

table of contents: 
[this is the order of topics - if you use a word finder and enter the 
word(s) listed in the "contents," you will (eventually) land on the 
topic indicated]

Truth
Business Besmirched Life as the basis of values: 
Positive Rights: 
Communists and Nazis: 
K. Marx on non-violent revolutions: 
Karl Marx on international revolution: 
Marx on free markets: 
Marx on Individuality: 
Marx on exchange: 
Willard Gaylin on the individual:
S.Maugham on Aristotle's mistaken essentialism: 
Graham Greene on Altruism: 
Dick Francis on Business ethics: 
Shirley Christian on Marxist Imperialism: 
The Folly of Intuitionism:  
F. A. Hayek on prices: 
Socrates on Reason: 
Mill on Radical ideas: 
On the homo economicus conception of human behavior: 
Andrei Gromyko on human rights: 
The New Testament on fairness: 
Emerson on Free Will
On positive liberty: 
On State Ownership: 
Adam Smith on virtue: 
Adam Smith on morality: 
Social Sciences: 
Positive Freedom: 
Property Rights and Morality: 
Economics and Morality: 
Milton Friedman: 
Gary Becker: 
George Stigler: 
James Buchanan: 
E. J. Mishan: 
Murray N. Rothbard: 
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega: 
Judge Robert Bork, on the First Amendment: 
Judge Robert Bork's definition of "explicit political speech": 
Bill of Rights: 
Holmes's on Economic Liberty and the Constitution: 
Individualism 
Christian Wholism: 
Hobbesian Ideas Today 
Self-Defeating Capitalism 
Hobbes and liberal capitalism: 
On Excusing Rights Violations: Wm. Pitt the younger
Communist Tactics: Lenin
Communist Tactics: Manuilski
Austrian Subjective Values
Reason
Liberty
Altruism 
Edmund Burke
Pablo Picasso
Michael de Montaigne
David Kelley & Jeff Scott
Herman Hesse on Dualism
Hegel on Altruism?
Hegel on Feelings
Lamont on free will
Clark on Determinism
Kennan on sex
Aristotle on Self-Love
Alasdair MacIntyre
Altruism (Maclagan)
 
 ======================================================================

Truth:
What is a lie when every man has his own truth? [from the television 
program Homicide 1/20/95 on NBC TV]
 
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] 
 
K. Marx on non-violent revolutions:
You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various 
countries must be taken into consideration and we do not deny that there 
are countries--such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with 
your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland-- where workers can 
attain their goal by peaceful means. [The Karl Marx Library Vol. I: On 
Revolution, ed., Soul R. Padover (McGraw- Hill, 1971), p. 64]

Karl Marx on international revolution:
If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution 
in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian 
common ownership of land may serve as the starting- point for a communist 
development. [Karl Marx, Selected Writings (Oxford UP, 1977), ed., D. 
McLennan]
 
The economists express it like this: each person has his private 
interests in mind, and nothing else; as a consequence he serves 
everyone's private interests, i.e., the general interest, without wishing 
to or knowing that he is.  The irony of this is not that the totality of 
private interest--which is the same as the general interest--can be 
attained by the individual's following his own interest.  Rather it could 
be inferred from this abstract phrase that everyone hinders the 
satisfaction of everyone else's interest, that instead of a general 
affirmation, the result of this war of all against all is rather a 
general negation.  The point is rather that private interest is itself 
already a socially determined interest, which can only be achieved within 
the conditions established by society and through the means that society 
affords, and that it is thus linked to the reproduction of these 
conditions and means.  It is certainly the interest of private 
individuals that is at stake;  but its content, as well as the form and 
the means of its realisation, is only given by social conditions 
independent of all these individuals. [Grundrisse, New York: Harper & 
Row, 1970, pp. 65-66]
 
This kind of liberty [free competition] is thus at the same time the most 
complete suppression of all individual liberty and total subjugation of 
individuality to social conditions which take the form of material 
forces--and even of all-powerful objects that are independent of the 
individuals relating to them.  The only rational answer to the 
deification of free competition by the middle-class prophets, or its 
diapolisation by the socialists, lies in its own development. [Ibid, p. 131]
 
Marx on Individuality:
Free individuality, which is founded on the universal development of 
individuals and the domination of their communal and social productivity, 
which has become their social power, is the third stage [of society]. 
[Grundrisse, NY: H&R, 1970, p. 67]
 
Marx on exchange:
. . .the exchange relationship establishes itself as a force externally 
opposed to the producers, and independent of them. [Ibid, p. 61]
The private exchange of all the products of labour, capacities and 
activities is opposed to the distribution founded on the spontaneous or 
political hierarchy of individuals within patriarchal, ancient or feudal 
societies (where exchange only plays a secondary role and hardly affects 
the entire life of communities, since it only occurs between them and 
does not dominate all the relationships of production and commerce). But 
private exchange is opposed just as much to the free exchange of 
associated individuals on the basis of collective appropriation and 
control of the means of production. . . .[Ibid., 68]
 
S. Maugham:
Looking for the special function of man Aristotle decided that since he 
shares growth with the plants and perception with the beasts, and alone 
has a rational element, his function is the activity of the soul.  From 
this he concluded, not as you would have thought sensible, that man 
should cultivate the three forms of activity which he ascribes to him, 
but that he should pursue only that which is especial to him.  
Philosophers and moralists have looked at the body with misgivings.  They 
have pointed out tha t its satisfactions are brief.  But a pleasure is 
nonetheless a pleasure because it does not please forever. [W. S. 
Maugham, The Summing Up (Pocket Books, 1967), pp. 35-6] 
 
I have never found that suffering improves the character.  Its influence 
to refine and ennoble is a myth.  A Writer's Notebook [Penguin, 1967], p. 
147.
 
I have suffered from poverty and the anguish of unrequited love, 
disappointment, disillusion, lack of opportunity and recognition, want of 
freedom; and I know that they made me envious and uncharitable, 
irritable, selfish, unjust; prosperity, success, happiness, have made me 
a better man. [Ibid]
 
To some, Prometheus, chained to his rock and strong in his unconquerable 
courage, is a more inspiring example than that other, hanging on a 
shameful cross, who besought His Father to forgive His enemies because 
they knew not what they did.  Resignation is too close to apathy for the 
spirited mind. [Ibid, 148]
 
...intuition, [is] a subject upon which certain philosophers have reared 
an imposing edifice of surmise, but which seems to me to offer as 
insecure a foundation for any structure more substantial than a Castle in 
Spain as a ping pong ball wavering on a jet of water in a shooting 
gallery. [Ibid, 325]
 
I have read much philosophy, and though I do not see how it is possible 
to refuse intellectual assent to certain theories of the Absolute, I can 
find nothing in them to induce me to depart from my instinctive disbelief 
in what is usually meant by the word religion.  I have little patience 
with the writers who try to reconcile in one conception the Absolute of 
the metaphysician with the God of Christianity.  But if I had had any 
doubts, the [First World] war would have effectually silenced them.[Ibid, 
145]
 
The majority of us are fairly decent, doing our best in that state of 
life in which chance has placed us; and if we believe in a judgment we 
feel that God has too much wisdom and good sense to bother much about 
failings which we mortals have no difficulty in forgiving in our 
neighbors. [Ibid, 145-6]
 
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. Looser Takes 
All, Penguin, 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 attering 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]
 
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 landowner.   '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 seem 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., 
Furtune, 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.]
 
Hobbes and liberal capitalism:
"[The purpose of a public sphere is] merely to facilitate private 
interaction.  This is a move of immense ideological significance because 
it provides for the germination of the liberal notion that the state ... 
is  fundamentally undesirable, an illegitimate intruder except where its 
actions facilitate private interaction." "[Moreover Hobbes's] negative 
libertarianism survived and achieved the preeminent status it did in the 
dominant ideology because of its affinity with these emerging economic 
and social relations" [Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal 
Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 60 and 63.].
 
Hobbes conception of goodness:
But whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it 
which he for his part calleth good: and the object of his hate and 
aversion, evil ....For these words of good and evil ... are ever used 
with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply 
and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil .... [Leviathan, 
Chapter 6, "Good"; Collier, p. 48] 
 
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]
 
Conservatism:
...Men have no right to risk the very existence of their nation and their 
civilization upon experiments in morals and politics; for each man's 
private capital of intelligence is petty; it is only when a man draws 
upon the bank and capital of the ages, the wisdom of our ancestors, that 
he can act wisely. [Edmund Burke, quoted in Kenneth M. Dolbeare, 
Directions of American Political Thought (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 
Inc., 1969), p. 11).]
 
Edmund Burke proposed that     
 "We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private 
stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, 
and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the 
general bank of nations and of ages."
 
On Excusing Rights Violations:
Necessity is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves. [Wm. 
Pitt (the younger), Speech on the India Bill (November, 1783).] 
 
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.... 
 
[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].
 
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
 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."
 
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."
 
W. Somerset Maugham
"... finally science had not fulfilled the promises which the unwise 
expected, and, dissatisfied at not receiving answers to questions that 
science never pretended to answer, many threw themselves into the arms of 
the Church."
 
"I have read much philosophy, and though I do not see how it is possible 
to refuse intellectual assent to certain theories of the Absolute, I can 
find nothing in them to induce me to depart from my instinctive disbelief 
in what is usually meant by the word religion."
 
"I have never found that suffering improves the character.  Its influence 
to refine and ennoble is a myth."
 
"... intuition, a subject upon which certain philosophers have reared an 
imposing edifice of surmise, but which seems to me to offer as insecure a 
foundation for any structure more substantial than a Castle in Spain as a 
ping-pong ball wavering on a jet of water in a shooting-gallery."
 
Herman Hesse:
"The eye of desire dirties and distorts.  Only when we desire nothing, 
only when our gaze becomes pure contemplation, does the soul of things 
(which is beauty) open itself to us.  If I inspect a forest with the 
intention of buying it, renting it, cutting it down, going hunting in it, 
or mortgaging it, then I do not see the forest but only its relation to 
my desires, plans, and concerns, to my purse.  Then it consists of wood, 
it is young or old, healthy or diseased.  But if I want nothing from it 
but to gaze, "thoughtlessly," into its green depths, then it becomes a 
forest, nature, a growing thing;  only then is it beautiful." "Concerning 
the Soul," in Herman Hesse, My Belief, Essays on Life and Art [New York: 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974], p. 37. 
 
"The collective mankind becomes for us a representation of the soul." p. 
38 
 
"The soul has no knowledge, no judgment, no program.  It has simply 
impetus, feeling, and future.  The great saints and preachers followed 
it, the heroes and sufferers, the great generals and conquerors; the 
great magicians and artists followed it, and all those whose way began in 
the commonplace and ended on the holy heights.  The way of millionaires 
is a different way and ends in the sanitarium." p. 45. 
 
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)
 
Alasdair MacIntyre:
[T]he Marxists understanding of liberalism as ideological, as a deceiving 
and self-deceiving mask for certain socialo interests, remains compelling.
 
Liberalism in the name of freedom imposes a certain kind of 
unacknowledged domination, and one which in the long run tends to 
dissolve traditional human ties and to impoverish social and cultural 
relationships.  Liberalism, while imposing through state power regimes 
that declare everyone free to pursue whatever they take to be their own 
good, deprives most people of the possibility of understanding their 
lives as a quest for the discovery and achievement of the good, 
especially by the way in which it attempts to discredit those traditional 
forms of human community within which this project has to be embodied. 
(Aladair MacIntyre, "Nietzsche or Aristotle?" in Giovanna Borradori, The 
American Philosopher [University of Chiago Press, 1994], p. 143.)
 
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.