You May Also Like / View all maxioms
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.
All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.
Except in the sacred texts of democracy and in the incantations of orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend read more
Except in the sacred texts of democracy and in the incantations of orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force. What other virtue can there be in fifty-one percent except the brute fact that fifty-one is more than forty-nine? The rule of fifty-one per cent is a convenience, it is for certain matters a satisfactory political device, it is for others the lesser of two evils, and for others it is acceptable because we do not know any less troublesome method of obtaining a political decision. But it may easily become an absurd tyranny if we regard it worshipfully, as though it were more than a political device. We have lost all sense of its true meaning when we imagine that the opinion of fifty-one per cent is in some high fashion the true opinion of the whole hundred per cent, or indulge in the sophistry that the rule of a majority is based upon the ultimate equality of man.
Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'etre to the imperfection of man and can read more
Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'etre to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man's innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.
We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our read more
We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.
Politics is not an exact science.
Politics is not an exact science.
Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.".
Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.".
The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all read more
The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune.
A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune.
