Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
~ Frédéric Bastiat
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The qualities which produce the dogged, unbeatable courage of the British, personified at the time by Winston Churchill, can appear in other settings as stubbornness bordering on stupidity.
~ Dean Acheson
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Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.
~ Marcel Proust
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We only become beasts — we become worse than beasts — when we torment others.
~ Iain Banks
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Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
~ Audre Lorde
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Satirists are famously also moralists, and Michel Houellebecq is no exception. Indeed, he’s a religious writer, even though his scabrous novels usually scoff at established religion.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it.
~ Marcel Proust
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Vietnam was worse than immoral — it was a mistake.
~ Dean Acheson
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Organizations are goal-directed, boundary-maintaining, activity systems.
~ Howard E. Aldrich
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In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
~ Roger Scruton
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