I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.
~ Desiderius Erasmus
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The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind.
~ Roger Scruton
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The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.
~ Frédéric Bastiat
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The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.
~ Blaise Pascal
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The sea has neither meaning nor pity.
~ Anton Chekhov
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Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want.
~ Jonathan Swift
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Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
~ Marcel Proust
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Empires are synonymous with centralized — if occasionally schismatized — hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through — usually — a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser — as a rule nominally independent — power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance.
~ Iain Banks
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A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
~ Jonathan Swift
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Like sailors in a storm, expecting every instant to go to the bottom, the believers suddenly became religious, prayed violently, and flattered themselves that they repented them of their evil courses. But a plain tale soon put them down, and quenched their religion entirely.
~ Charles MacKay
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