Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

A few quotes at random from my random reading:

 

It is precisely the unwarranted identification of democracy with liberty which has caused a great many of the recurrent tragedies of American foreign policy (as well as a number of internal American woes!). We have to remember all the wars, all the propaganda, all the pressure campaigns for the cause of democracy, how every hailed and applauded victory of democracy has ended in terrible defeat for personal liberty, the one cause really dear to American hearts.
— Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House Publishers, 1974.

 

Yet the only task government was ever supposed to assume—of protecting our life and property—it does not perform. To the contrary, the higher the state expenditures on social, public, and national security have risen, the more private property rights have been eroded, the more property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, and depreciated, and the more have people been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: of personal independence, economic strength, and private wealth. The more paper laws have been produced, the more legal uncertainty and moral hazard has been created, and lawlessness has displaced law and order. And while we have become ever more dependent, helpless, impoverished, threatened and insecure, the ruling elite of politicians and plutocrats has become increasingly richer, more corrupt, dangerously armed, and arrogant.
—Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Short History of Man, Progress and Decline, Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute, 2015.

 

Rand’s harsh and polemical tone, coupled with her caricaturing of many philosophers, led Sidney Hook to denounce the book for its sloganeering: “This is the way philosophy is written in the Soviet Union. In a free culture there must always be room for vigorous polemic and controversy but civility of mind is integral to the concept of a civilized society.’

Despite pinpointing a very real lack of civility in Rand’s exposition, Hook did not realize that Rand’s impulse toward synthesis was indeed the way philosophy had been written in Russia for many generations. Rand provoked the wrath of academicians partially because, like her Russian philosophical ancestors, she was an outcast, a social critic writing with a passionately immoderate tone that was far more accessible to the general public and far less considerate of scholarly give-and-take.
—Chris Mathew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand, The Russian Radical, second edition. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.

 

Character assassination. What a wonderful idea. Ordinary assassination only works once, but this one works every day.
—Terry Pratchett, The Truth, 25th Discworld Novel, p. 174. New York: Doubleday/Transworld, 2000.

 

…the real world is much smaller than the world of our imagination…
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, translated by John McFarland Kennedy. Book I, Section 10. New York: the MacMillian Company, 1911.

 

Again, you must keep in mind that the actual information content is irrelevant. SJWs communicate in competitive emotion. If you're not doing the same, then you're not communicating with them, you're doing little more than play punching bag for their verbal strikes. I realize this probably doesn't make sense, but that's because you are a normal, sane individual who thinks rather than feels. But keep in mind that just as their argument that X is Not X because feelbad makes no sense to you, your argument that X cannot be Not X due to the law of non-contradiction makes no sense to an SJW.
—Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, Kouvola, Finland: Castalia House, 2015.

 

Her ideas spoke powerfully to students who hoped that in college they would study the great questions of existence, and instead found their idealism stifled by a climate of skepticism and moral relativity. As one Objectivist remembered, “I thought that philosophy and psychology held the key to understanding the “meaning of life.’ When I took those courses, I found myself studying instead the meaning of words and the behavior of rats in mazes.” Objectivism filled in the gaps universities left unattended.

Another student outlined myriad complaints in a letter to Rand. He was particularly bothered by a pervasive cynicism in the two universities he had attended: “Anyone who seeks, or makes a statement on, truth and/or beauty is (a) ignored, (b) the recipient of a vague, benevolent smile, (c) scorned, (d) politely laughed at and called ’unsophisticated,’ or (e) treated as a refugee from some quaint spot, which, fortunately, is now ‘lost.’” Rand, though, was interested in both truth and beauty.
—Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

 

The bad man, if he is being brought into a better way of life and thought, may make some advance, however slight, and if he should once improve, even ever so little, it is plain that he might change completely, or at any rate make very great progress; for a man becomes more and more easily moved to virtue, however small the improvement was at first. It is, therefore, natural to suppose that he will make yet greater progress than he has made in the past; and as this process goes on, it will change him completely and establish him in the contrary state, provided he is not hindered by lack of time.
—Aristotle, Categories, translated by E. M. Edghill. Project Gutenberg EBook #2412.

 

They will only cause the lower classes to move about needlessly.
—The Duke of Wellington, on early steam railroads.

 

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
—Thomas Paine, Common Sense

 

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable. Wisdom is knowing not to include it in a fruit salad.
—Anon.

 

Take away justice, then, and what are governments but great confederacies of robbers? After all, what are confederacies of robbers unless they are small-scale governments? The gang itself consists of men, it is directed by the authority of the chief, it is bound together by a pact of mutual support, and the loot is divided in accordance with an agreed law. If, as a result of the recruitment of desperadoes, this evil grows to such an extent that it takes control of a territory, establishes bases, occupies cities and subjugates peoples, then it assumes the name of a government, the more openly because this is now plainly applicable: not because the robbers have renounced their rapacity, but because they are no longer at risk of punishment. The reply that a captured pirate made to Alexander the Great was apposite and legitimate. For when the ruler asked the man how he could justify making the sea a dangerous place, he answered, with defiant outspokenness, “In exactly the way that you justify doing the same to the whole world. But because I do it with a single paltry ship, I am called a robber; while you do it with a large navy, and are called an emperor.”
—Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (Book IV, Chapter iv)

 

And here is issue 969. Enjoy!