Maggie's Farm

"My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.”

"Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.”

Lord Acton

“Political atheism: End justifies the means. This is still the most widespread of all the opinions inimical to liberty.”

Lord Acton

Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this too I believe, that unless I first believe, I shall not understand.

Saint Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033 – 1109) h/t Anchoress' Believe! And Get Yer Patron Saint!

The way I say it is that you can study the chemistry of water for years, but you can't know what water is until you jump in the pond and take a swim in it.

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.

Lord Acton

..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.

Lord Acton

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

Lord Acton

"If you can't come up with a good answer, maybe it's because you're asking the wrong question."

Everybody says it, but I keep forgetting it: Always look back to the premise

“Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things. We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best."

CS Lewis, via The First Things First Principle

"Atheism is like AIDS: it robs you of the ability to repel invading viruses, philosophical or mental, by crippling the spiritual version of your immune system."

John C. Wright, h/t Vanderleun

"Nothing is worth more than this day."

Goethe

"We get too soon old, and too late smart."

An old German saying

"Being that stupid should hurt."

Slightly adapted from a recent observation by Neptunus. It can seem like a shame that ignorance is painless, but maybe it's all for the best...People used to say "No brain, no pain," but I like the way Imus says "That is so dumb it makes my hair hurt."

"There is no substitute for the courage to act."

Ralph Peters

“I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth."

William F. Buckley Jr, via Samiz

All that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - [is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity. Fair enough, CS, but being in requited love with a young lady comes close, given our human limits.

People have a strong tendency to reject out of hand any information or argument that cuts against their preexisting political views, and this is especially true of those most committed to their ideology or political party. Unfortunately, voters have strong incentives to be both ignorant about public policy and irrational in their evaluation of the information they do know.

Our friend Ilya, at Volokh

"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."

George Orwell (h/t, reader)

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."

H. L. Menchen (h/t, reader)

"Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-state of mind."

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

 "... we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected) he often feels that it would not be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along - illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation - he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us."

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Our struggle is not with Obama or Reid or Pelosi, it is with the system that they advance. A system of unrestricted power that mandates absolute dominance over all human affairs backed by an ideology that treats all human activity as political and in need of control in the name of the greater good. Getting them all out is a plus, but it's a battle, not the war.

Dan Greenfield (Sultan Knish) in Winning the System

Superficiality is only skin deep.

Joseph Wambaugh, in one of his books - I forget which one

"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both."

James Dale Davidson

"In the place where repentant sinners stand, perfect saints cannot stand."

Talmud

,,,the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearance, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

Niccolo Machiavelli (h/t Zen)

Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. . . . Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

George Santayana on the modern Liberal, 100 years ago:

 “his ultimate satisfaction in his work is not founded on any good done, but on a passionate willfulness. He calls the thing he wants for others good, because he wants to bestow it on them, not because they naturally want it for themselves. Incapable of sympathy, he has a momentary pleasure in policy.”

As quoted in Bergner's Mugged by Mythology - Liberals believe the darnedest things.

Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents?

Mark Steyn, in A Tale of Two Declines - Even if the economy were to fix itself overnight, we'd still face sincere cultural challenges.

The wise Ray Dalio says we're in decline - a post about that later today.

“The budget must be balanced, the Treasury must be refilled, public debt must be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom must be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands must be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”

Cicero, 55 B.C., as quoted by Bruce here yesterday

Via Vanderleun:

"The loss of transcendence evokes the flight to utopia. I am convinced that the destruction of transcendence is the actual amputation of human beings from which all other sicknesses flow. Robbed of their real greatness they can only find escape in illusory hopes." 

Benedict XVI

The thief believes that everybody steals.

- Danish aphorism. I cannot spell it in the Danish.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head…Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness – or so good as drink.

G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News 1907, from a selection of Chesterton quotes at Anchoress

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

William Shakespeare