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.

What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to read more

What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?

In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also is despotic governments: in the former, because they are read more

In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also is despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.

Fascism is capitalism in decay.

Fascism is capitalism in decay.

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.

The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.

The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their read more

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.

The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing read more

The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.

Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.

Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.