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"One effect of our habitually identifying order with a made order or taxis is indeed that we tend to ascribe to all order certain properties which deliberate arrangements regularly, and with respect to some of these properties necessarily, possess. Such orders are relatively simple or at least necessarily confined to such moderate degrees of complexity as the maker can still survey; they are usually concrete in the sense just mentioned that their existence can be intuitively perceived by inspection; and, finally, having been made deliberately, they invariably do (or at one time did) serve a purpose of the maker. None of these characteristics necessarily belong to a spontaneous order or kosmos. Its degree of complexity is not limited to what a human mind can master." Friedrich Hayek   "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   "Art is order. But order is not necessarily just, kind or beautiful. Order may be arbitrary, harsh, and cruel. Art has nothing to do with morality." Camille Paglia   "The materials available to the mind and imagination are vast, and the combination of those materials are virtually infinite. The possibility for error, uncertainty, and confusion is an ever-present fact of human mental life. Because they have an irrepressibly active and unstable mental life, humans have a special need to fabricate mental maps or models that make sense of the world and provide behavioral directives that can take the place of instinctive behavioral patterns. For these mental maps or models to be effective in providing behavioral directives, they must be emotionally saturated, imaginatively vivid. Art and cultural artifacts like religion and ideology meet this demand. They fulfill a necessary adaptive function, that of regulating the human cognitive behavioral system. The arts provide emotionally saturated images and aesthetic constructs that produce a sense of total cognitive order and that help regulate the other behavioral systems. The arts make sense of human needs and motives. They simulate subjective experience, map out social relations, evoke sexual and social interactions, depict the intimate relations of kin, and locate the whole complex and interactive array of human behavioral systems within models of the total world order. Humans have a universal and irrepressible need to fabricate this sort of order, and satisfying that need provides a distinct form of pleasure and fulfillment." Joseph Carroll   "We are a democracy. Some of my Republican friends and some of my Democratic friends even occasionally say, well, if you can't get the votes then, by executive order, you're going to do something. Things you can't do by executive order unless you're a dictator. We're a democracy. We need consensus." Joe Biden   "The anarchy of individual production is already an anachronism. The control of the community over itself extends every day. We demand order, method, regularity, design; the accidents of sickness and misfortune, of old age and bereavement, must be prevented if possible, and if not, mitigated. Of this principle the public is already convinced: it is merely a question of working out the details. But order and forethought is wanted for industry as well as for human life. Competition is bad, and in most respects private monopoly is worse. No one now seriously defends the system of rival traders with their crowds of commercial travellers: of rival tradesmen with their innumerable deliveries in each street; and yet no one advocates the capitalist alternative, the great trust, often concealed and insidious, which monopolises oil or tobacco or diamonds, and makes huge profits for a fortunate few out of the helplessness of the unorganised consumers." Edward Reynolds Pease   "The state is born out of the relative weakness of the old order of tribes and clans. It is a permanent revision of the political order, which introduces a standing central government over the tribes and clans. This includes the establishment of a professional armed force that is not disbanded in peacetime, a bureaucracy capable of raising taxes sufficient to maintain such a force; and a ruler or government with the authority to issue decrees that are then imposed, where necessary, by means of armed force. Such government concentrates an unprecedented degree of power in the hands of a small number of individuals—power that can be used to defend the tribes against external enemies, for adjudicating and suppressing disputes among them, and for instituting uniform religious rites on a national scale." Yoram Hazony   "It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilized men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, would make it an useless and costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from being our customers in order that they might continue to be our slaves." Thomas Babington Macaulay   "How many subterfuges and mental gymnastics all the ancient and modern thinkers have employed, in order to avoid falling out with the ministers of the Gods, who in all ages were the true tyrants of thought! How Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, and many others have been compelled to invent hypotheses and evasions in order to reconcile their discoveries with the reveries and the blunders which religion had rendered sacred! With what prevarications have not the greatest philosophers guarded themselves even at the risk of being absurd, inconsistent, and unintelligible whenever their ideas did not correspond with the principles of theology! Vigilant priests were always ready to extinguish systems which could not be made to tally with their interests." Paul-Henri Thiry   "Most of them, at least those who influenced the American character most deeply, were weary of well-trodden paths, of old institutions, and most of all, of old abuses. They left Europe to give their ideas a free rein—ideas that were not very interesting in themselves, since they remained within the narrow scope of theological quarrels. These people were, to put it bluntly, fanatics, the kind of boring, nasty, insufferable people that nature seems to produce from time to time in order to set in motion a widespread popular movement or to clear the land of a whole continent—because, of course, likeable, reasonable people never change anything in the order of the universe." Edith Wharton   "The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling. Because they were born and raised in a given social order and in a given system of values, they believe that any other order must be 'unnatural,' and that it cannot last because it is incompatible with human nature. But even they may one day know fire, hunger, and the sword." Czeslaw Milosz   "'We believe you have got to have the abolition of national fighting forces,' he declared, reiterating his demand for 'total disarmament.' That included the RAF, which turned out to be Britain's saviour in 1940. 'There is no defence against air attack,' he said, wrongly. At the Labour Conference in Southport in 1934, he told delegates, 'We are deliberately putting a world order before loyalty to our own country. We will be called very disloyal because we owe allegiance here to a world order rather than to what is called patriotism.' Attlee changed his mind in the late 1930s when the reality of Hitler's menace became stark, but Labour's early posturing undermined a resolute, united approach by Britain." Leo McKinstry   "In one of Grimm's fairy tales there is a story of a young man who goes in search of adventure in order to learn what it is to be in anxiety. We will let the adventurer pursue his journey without concerning ourselves about whether he encountered the terrible on his way. However, I will say that this is an adventure that every human being must go through—to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate." Soren Kierkegaard   "It is a weakness in the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, and one of which Dicey was fully aware, that some decisions are so fundamental that a decision by Parliament alone does not yield legitimacy. Amongst those decisions are the transfer of Parliament's powers either downwards—through devolution—it has become perhaps a convention of the constitution that legislative devolution is to be preceded by a referendum—or upward to a supranational legal order such as the European Union, or continued allegiance to such a supranational legal order. In general elections, the people are given authority to MPs to legislate, but not to transfer the powers of Parliament. 'The Legislative,' Locke insists, 'cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands. For it being but a delegated power from the people, they who have it cannot pass it over to others.'" Vernon Bogdanor   "It is because men are not in the habit of considering what the end of government is, that Catholic disabilities and Jewish disabilities have been suffered to exist so long. We hear of essentially Protestant governments and essentially Christian governments, words which mean just as much as essentially Protestant cookery, or essentially Christian horsemanship. Government exists for the purpose of keeping the peace, for the purpose of compelling us to settle our disputes by arbitration instead of settling them by blows, for the purpose of compelling us to supply our wants by industry instead of supplying them by rapine. This is the only operation for which the machinery of government is peculiarly adapted, the only operation which wise governments ever propose to themselves as their chief object. If there is any class of people who are not interested, or who do not think themselves interested, in the security of property and the maintenance of order, that class ought to have no share of the powers which exist for the purpose of securing property and maintaining order. But why a man should be less fit to exercise those powers because he wears a beard, because he does not eat ham, because he goes to the synagogue on Saturdays instead of going to the church on Sundays, we cannot conceive." Thomas Babington Macaulay   "To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brick-maker, the brick-layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill-wright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them." Adam Smith   "The action of any comedy is less interesting—certainly less memorable—than the discussions it contains. A tragedy whose plot cannot be remembered in the strict order of its events is no tragedy at all; the events must create their own order, from which there is no escape, or else they will have no meaning for the mind. This must have been what Aristotle meant when he said the soul of a tragedy was its plot; the action was everything. In comedy there is action too, or we should have no story; but it is most interesting for what can be said about it before and after it is done." Mark Van Doren   "The less we are able to satisfy our private passions, the more we abandon ourselves to those of a general nature. How comes it that monks are so fond of their order? It is owing to the very cause that renders the order insupportable. Their rule debars them from all those things by which the ordinary passions are fed, there remains therefore only this passion for the very rule that torments them. The more austere it is, that is, the more it curbs their inclinations, the more force it gives to the only passion left them." Charles-Louis de Secondat   "Nature, which has established in the universe a chain of being and universal order, descending from archangels to microscopic animalcules, has ordained that no two objects shall be perfectly alike, and no two creatures perfectly equal. Although, among men, all are subject by nature to equal laws of morality, and in society have a right to equal laws for their government, yet no two men are perfectly equal in person, property, understanding, activity, and virtue, or ever can be made so by any power less than that which created them; and whenever it becomes disputable, between two individuals or families, which is the superior, a fermentation commences, which disturbs the order of all things until it is settled, and each one knows his place in the opinion of the public." John Adams   "Moral and spiritual laws govern the moral life, but they do not regulate society, which is an association of free individuals, all with purposes of their own. Moral and spiritual laws must therefore be supplemented by another kind of law, one that is responsive to the changing forms of human conflict. This was made transparently clear by Jesus in the parable of the Tribute Money ('Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's'), and by the Papal doctrine of the 'Two Swords'—the two forms of law, human and divine, on which good government depends. The law enforced by our courts requires the parties to submit only to the secular jurisdiction. It treats all parties as responsible individuals, acting freely for themselves. Law exists in order to resolve conflicts among free beings, not in order to lead them to salvation." Roger Scruton