Quotations That Shine a Strong Light

I am convinced, however, that anarchy is not the principal evil that democratic ages have to fear, but the least. For the principle of equality begets two tendencies: the one leads men straight to independence and may suddenly drive them into anarchy; the other conducts them by a longer, more secret, but more certain road to servitude. (p. 305)

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. (p. 335)

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. The power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritance: what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living. Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits... Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. (pp. 336-337) [Alexis de Tocqueville. From Democracy in America, Volume II. 1840]

Just as the purpose of education in monarchies is to enoble men's hearts, so its purpose in despotic states is to debase them. In despotic states education must be servile. Even those holding power benefit from such an education, for no one can be a tyrant without at the same time being a slave...Absolute obedience presupposes ignorance in the person who obeys; ignorance is presupposed as well in the person who commands. For he need not deliberate, doubt, or reason; he has only to will...Thus education is in one sense nonexistent. Everything previously known must be wiped out, so that something may be taught. It is necessary first to make a man into a bad subject in order to create a good slave. [Montesquieu. Spirit of the laws. 1748]

Erect your schemes with as much method and skill as you please; yet if the materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails (the guts of modern brains), the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb, the duration of which, like that of other spiders' webs, may be imputed to their being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a corner. [Jonathan Swift. The battle of the books. 1704]

In these Colleges, the Professors contrive new Rules and Methods of Agriculture and Building, and new Instruments and Tools for all Trades and Manufactures, whereby, as they undertake, one Man shall do the Work of Ten; a Palace may be built in a Week, of Materials so durable as to last for ever without repairing. All the Fruits of the Earth shall come to maturity at whatever Season we think fit to Chuse, and increase an Hundred Fold more than they do at present; with innumerable other happy proposals. The only Inconvenience is, that none of these Projects are yet brought to Perfection; and in the mean time, the whole Country lies miserably waste, the House in Ruins, and the People without Food or Cloaths. By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are Fifty Times more violently bent upon prosecuting their Schemes, driven equally on by Hope and Despair. [Jonathan Swift. "A voyage to Laputa," in Gulliver's Travels. 1726]

Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are everywhere to be met in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself... Disputes are multiplied, as if everything was uncertain. Amidst all this bustle, it is not reason which carries the prize, but eloquence: and no man needs ever despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colours. The victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and the sword, but by the trumpeters, drummers, and musicians of the army. [David Hume. A treatise of human nature. 1738]

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and borrowed language. [Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1851-52]

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said:
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.
Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing besides remains.
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
[Percy Bysshe Shelley. 1817]

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life... If we survey for instance the vast culture which during the last century has been embodied in things and in knowledge, in institutions and comforts, and if we compare them with the cultural progress of the individual during the same period--at least in the upper classes--we would see a frightful difference in rate of growth between the two which represents, in many points, rather a regression of the culture of the individual with reference to spirituality, delicacy, and idealism. This discrepancy is in essence the result of the success of the growing division of labor. For it is this which requires from the individual an ever more one-sided type of achievement which, at its highest point, often permits his personality as a whole to fall into neglect. In any case this overgrowth of objective culture has been less and less satisfactory for the individual. Perhaps less conscious than in practical activity and in the obscure complex of feelings which flow from him, he is reduced to a negligible quantity. He becomes a single cog as over against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces which gradually take out of his hands everything connected with progress, spirituality, and value... [Georg Simmel. "The metropolis and mental life." 1903]

At what exact point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about any one of them individually----especially at the time when the thoughts of the person arrested are wrapped tightly about the big question: "What for?"--and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive... Or, if during periods of mass arrests...people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, not withstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to halt!

If . . . if . . . We didn't love freedom enough. And even more--we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! (p. 13) [Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipeligo, 1918-1956. 1973]

The Chimney Sweeper

And therefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark; for all is habit; and when you are accustomed you will see ten thousand times better than those in the den, and you will know what the images are, and of what they are images, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus the order of our State will be a waking reality, and not a dream, as is commonly the manner of States; in most of them men are fighting with one another about shadows and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. But the truth is, that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is the best and most quietly governed, and that in which they are most willing, the worst. [Plato. The Republic. Book VII, 520]

Until, then, philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who follow either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never cease from ill--no, nor the human race, as I believe... [Plato. The Republic. Book V, 473]

Learning a lesson of one level presupposes having learned lessons of all the levels below it. By no pedagogic ingenuities could you teach a child what stealing is before teaching him what owning is; or teach a boy to parody a wink before teaching him to wink and to recognise winks; or train a recruit to obey orders to slope arms before training him to slope arms. For future purposes we should already notice that, for the same reasons, there can be no question of my being able to direct you to Larissa before I have learned the way to Larissa; or of my being able to locate and correct mistakes in my multiplication sum before being able to multiply. Some lessons are intrinsically traders on prior lessons. Such tradings can pyramid indefinitely. There is no top step on the stairway of accomplishment-levels. [Gilbert Ryle. "Thinking of thoughts: What is 'Le Penseur' Doing," 1968]

I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceivable sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself... Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. [Charles S. Peirce. "How to make our ideas clear," 1878]

Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis...is this: There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws... It may be asked how I know that there are any realities... The reply is this:..If investigation cannot be regarded as proving that there are real things, it at least does not lead to a contrary conclusion; but the method and the conception on which it is based remain ever in harmony. [Charles S. Peirce. "The fixation of belief," 1877]

Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the storm is but the wrapper and the envelope of the storm; and contains in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play--this is the thing which carries more true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters around their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in a whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side. [Herman Melville. Moby Dick. 1851]

From whatever aspect we consider the command, we can now see that, as we know it today, in the compact and perfected form it has acquired in the course of its long history, it is the most dangerous single element in the social life of mankind. We must have the courage to stand against it and break its tyranny. The full weight of its pressure must be removed; it must not be allowed to go more than skin-deep. The stings than man suffers must become burrs which can be removed with a touch. [Elias Canetti. Crowds and power. 1960.]

There can never be too many projectiles in a battle. Whether they are thrown by cannon, rockets or recoilless rifles is immaterial. The purpose of all these instruments is identical--namely to deluge the enemy with fire... In planning any operation, it is vital to remember, and constantly repeat to oneself, two things: "In war nothing is impossible, provided you use audacity," and "Do not take counsel of your fears." [George S. Patton, Jr. War as I knew it, 1947.]