+

"Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Morazán erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures." Garbriel Garcia Marquez   "It used to be argued that 1914 was a classic instance of a war begun through accident and error: that no statesmen wanted it but all were overborne by events. This view is now untenable. Certainly in late July the frantic telegram traffic became overwhelming, but governments were clear enough about what they were doing. A general conflict was the optimal outcome for none of them, but they preferred it to what seemed worse alternatives. Although Berlin and St Petersburg indeed miscalculated, all sides were willing to risk war rather than back down. The war developed from a Balkan confrontation in which neither Austria-Hungary nor Russia would yield and neither Germany nor France would restrain them. Once conflict spread from eastern to western Europe, Britain too was willing to intervene rather than see Belgium invaded and France beaten. In Vienna, Conrad had long urged war against Serbia, but Franz Joseph, Berchtold, and Tisza moved to military action only gradually, believing alternative choices were bankrupt, and only after considering how force would be used. In contrast they were recklessly insouciant about war with Russia, accepting it was likely but assuming that with German aid they could win. The Germans risked war against Russia and Britain with little idea of how to defeat either (and with what their general staff knew was a defective plan against France)." David Stevenson   "You don't want to mandate and try and force anyone to take a vaccine. We've never done that. You can mandate for certain groups of people like health workers, but for the general population you can't. I mean here at my own hospital at the NIH we get influenza vaccines and if you refuse with no good reason other than you just don't want to take it, then we don't allow you to take care of patients on the wards during the influenza season. So that's a mandate. But we don't want to be mandating from the federal government to the general population. It would be unenforceable and not appropriate." Anthony Fauci   "The most absolute authority, wrote Rousseau, 'is that which penetrates into a man's inmost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions.' The truth of that observation is in no way lessened by the fact that for Rousseau genuinely legitimate government, government based upon the general will, should so penetrate. Rousseau saw correctly that the kind of power traditionally exercised by kings and princes, represented chiefly by the tax collector and the military, was in fact a very weak kind of power compared with what a philosophy of government resting on the general will could bring about. Tocqueville, from a vastly different philosophy of the state, also took note of the kind of power Rousseau described. 'It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in the great things than in the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without the other.'" Robert Nisbet   "We call a law every act of the legislative authority; but only some, today probably a small minority of them, are general rules applying to private persons. The state has its own means which it has to use for common ends, and its own servants to administer these means. It is today everywhere the task of the same legislatures to direct the use of these means, and to lay down general rules which the private citizen must observe. But while the government must administer the means put at its disposal, including the services of all those it has hired to carry out its instructions, this does not mean that it should or may in the same manner 'administer' the efforts of the private citizen." Friedrich Hayek   "Remarkably, the FBI did not just rely on Steele's information, but even shared its own information with him. At an October 2016 meeting in Rome, FBI officials disclosed to Steele highly sensitive and even classified material. A damning Justice Department investigation, overseen by Inspector General Michael Horowitz and released in December 2019, found that FBI agents gave Steele a 'general overview' of Crossfire Hurricane, including its specific—and, at the time, secret—probes of Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn. The Washington Post reported in February 2018 that Steele 'would later tell associates' that he gleaned from the meeting that that the FBI 'was particularly interested in' George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign adviser who served as the predicate for the entire investigation. The Post noted that 'Papadopoulos had not surfaced in Steele's research'—unsurprisingly, because media outlets like the Post hadn't written stories about him when Steele's 'research' was being invented." Aaron Maté   "'The first casualty of these flying Balkan bullets is the status quo,' an Austrian general bitterly noted. A status quo that had benefited Vienna suddenly lay 'dead as a mouse,' Mausetot. Within Austrian military circles, the solution to the Balkan crisis seemed clear. 'Let's let this thing explode into war,' General Appel scribbled from Sarajevo. 'What do we have to fear? Russia? They won't do anything, and we need to smash the Serbs once and for all.'" Geoffrey Wawro   "I think that I have said it in your hearing that I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man's rights; that each community, as a State, has a right to do exactly as it pleases with all the concerns within that State that interferes with the right of no other State; and that the General Government, upon principle, has no right to interfere with anything other than that general class of things that does concern the whole. I have said that at all times. I have said, as illustrations, that I do not believe in the right of Illinois to interfere with the cranberry laws of Indiana, the oyster laws of Virginia, or the liquor laws of Maine." Abraham Lincoln   "When the only external validation for the individual is what other individuals believe, everything depends on who those other individuals are. If they are simply people who are like-minded in general, then the consensus of the group about a particular new idea depends on what the group already believes in general—and says nothing about the empirical validity of that idea in the external world." Thomas Sowell   "That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values—indeed not merely one value among many but the source of all values—is almost self-evident. It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values, to contribute to their further growth, and to earn moral merit. Obedience has moral value only where it is a matter of choice and not of coercion. It is in the order in which we rank our different ends that our moral sense manifests itself; and in applying the general rules of morals to particular situations each individual is constantly called upon to interpret and apply the general principles and in doing so to create particular values." Friedrich Hayek   "That the French Revolution turned to dictatorship was no accident; it was driven there by inner necessity, and not for the first time either. Nor was it an accident that the Revolution led to the dictatorship of a general. But it so happened that this general was Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose temperament, even more than his genius, was unable to adapt to peace and moderation. Thus it was an unforeseeable contingency which tilted the scale in favour of 'la guerre éternelle.'" Georges Lefebvre   "A general interest and preoccupation with politics is the surest sign of a general decay in a society." Michael Oakeshott   "It is simply not true that works of fiction, prose or verse, that is to say works depicting the actions, thoughts and words and passions of imaginary human beings, directly extend our knowledge of life. Direct knowledge of life is knowledge directly in relation to ourselves, it is our knowledge of how people behave in general, of what they are like in general, in so far as that part of life in which we ourselves have participated gives us material for generalization. Knowledge of life obtained through fiction is only possible by another stage of self-consciousness. That is to say, it can only be a knowledge of other people's knowledge of life, not of life itself." Thomas Stearns Eliot   "Those who are specially interested in protective tariffs find it easy to believe that protection is of general benefit. The directness of their interest makes them active in spreading their views, and having control of large means—for the protected industries are those in which large capitals are engaged—and being ready on occasion, as a matter of business, to spend money in propagating their doctrines, they exert great influence upon the organs of public opinion. Free trade, on the contrary, offers no special advantage to any particular interest, and in the present state of social morality benefits or injuries which men share in common with their fellows are not felt so intensely as those which affect them specially." Henry George   "A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." Thomas Jefferson   "Eight to ten million soldiers will fight each other and will ravage Europe like no swarm of locusts we have ever seen. The devastations of the Thirty Years War will be compressed into three or four years and cover the continent; hunger, disease, and the common de-civilization of armies and people, will be brought about by acute misery. The hopeless breakdown of our artificial machinery of trade, industry, and credit will end in bankruptcy and the overthrowing of old states and their traditional state's wisdom, so that crowns will roll by the dozens into the streets, and there will be no one to pick them up. It is an absolute impossibility to predict where it will end and who will be the victor in this fight. Only one result is guaranteed: general exhaustion and the creation of the conditions necessary for the final victory of the working class." Friedrich Engels   "The most moving thing the theater can show is a character creating himself, the moment of choice, of the free decision which commits him to a moral code and a whole way of life. The situation is an appeal: it surrounds us, offering us solutions which it's up to us to choose. And in order for the decision to be deeply human, in order for it to bring the whole man into play, we have to stage limit situations, that is, situations which present alternatives one of which leads to death. Thus freedom is revealed in its highest degree, since it agrees to lose itself in order to be able to affirm itself. And since there is theater only if all the spectators are united, situations must be found which are so general that they are common to all. Immerse men in these universal and extreme situations which leave them only a couple of ways out, arrange things so that in choosing the way out they choose themselves, and you've won—the play is good." Jean-Paul Sartre   "To make the matter clear, let us compare our consciousness to a sheet of water of some depth. Then the distinctly conscious ideas are merely the surface; on the other hand, the mass of the water is the indistinct, the feelings, the after-sensation of perceptions and intuitions and what is experienced in general, mingled with the disposition of our own will that is the kernel of our inner nature. Now this mass of the whole consciousness is more or less, in proportion to intellectual liveliness, in constant motion, and the clear pictures of the imagination, or the distinct, conscious ideas expressed in words, and the resolves of the will are what come to the surface in consequence of this motion. The whole process of our thinking and resolving seldom lies on the surface, that is to say, seldom consists in a concatenation of clearly conceived judgments; although we aspire to this, in order to be able to give an account of it to ourselves and others." Arthur Schopenhauer   "If we believe in the possibility of renaissance, of a rebirth of fine things and powerful ideas that have been lost to our own time, the voices of the dead will bring them vividly before the mind's eye. We may hear with sudden discomfort words like those Oliver Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken!' We may start little by little to believe that some of our truths may be false, and some of our virtues may be vices." James Hankins   "Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact." Eric Blair