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"It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle." Tom Paine   "The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the eighteenth century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is 'useful,' because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law." Karl Marx   "There are a number of ways in which it is necessary to look at the Cultural Revolution. At one level it is necessary to see the real complications behind the official rhetoric. None the less it seems to me that the principle which was behind the rhetoric and some of the practice, and which no doubt got tangled up with much else, was a vital one: namely that even in the early stages of a post-revolutionary society it is an indispensable condition of socialist democracy that the division of labour should be challenged by regular participation of everyone in ordinary labour. The fact that the Chinese did not fully put it into practice or that certain people were exempted from it doesn't change the fundamental principle at all. That principle has never been so clearly and powerfully enunciated as in the Cultural Revolution. I do not think that anyone should manage or administer any form of labour without the knowledge that they themselves will perform it, as well as, preferably, having come from it. When I heard pathetic stories about professors being taken from their libraries and laboratories and sent to help bring in the harvest I felt totally on the side of the revolutionaries." Raymond Williams   "There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must co-operate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions it to instruct, not to destroy." Tom Paine   "A principle that can't be implemented is just a bad principle. Political thinking must be much more rigorously empirical than Socrates suggests in his discussion with Glaucon. It is not just that we can in practice apply our theories incorrectly, but that practice can show theory to be wrong. The way Socrates talks, if would seem that if things aren't working out in his Republic, this can only mean that there is an error of implementation. He shows no sign of being open to the idea that practical failure might reveal a problem with the theory." Julian Baggini   "Censorship does not abolish the struggle, it makes it one-sided, it converts an open struggle into a hidden one, it converts a struggle over principles into a struggle of principle without power against power without principle." Karl Marx   "What abundance did, in the period when its potentialities were being rapidly developed, was to throw out of balance the equilibrium between two forces, both of which are essential to a healthy society—the principle of mobility, which involves the welfare of man as an independent individual, and the principle of status, which involves his welfare as a member of the community. It destroyed this balance by making a good standard of living available for any man, while perpetuating a low standard as usual for most men. The continued low standard was the penalty for lack of mobility, and, as a consequence, mobility became mandatory. At the same time, the changes in the potential living standard began to make the system of status seem evil, for the status system had always consigned the vast majority to a life of bare sufficiency in an age when this was all that the existing economy would allow; but the growth of abundance, by making insufficiency unnecessary, made this aspect of status an avoidable one, thus making status itself seem needlessly harsh and unjust. In these circumstances, society exalted mobility inordinately, at the corresponding sacrifice of status." David Potter   "They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle." Abraham Lincoln   "Hazlitt's principle was that crimes, want of honour, want of faith, or want of every virtue on earth, were nothing on the part of an individual raised from the middle classes to the throne, if they forwarded the victory of the popular principle, whilst he remained there. I used to maintain that the basis of such a victory should be the very reverse of the vices and cruelties and weaknesses of decayed dynasties, and that in proportion as a man elevated as Napoleon was in such a cause deviated from the abstract virtue required, in the same proportion he injured the cause itself, and excused the very dynasties he wished to supplant and surpass." Benjamin Robert Haydon   "The tribe makes its law, not on an abstract principle that manslaughter is right or wrong, but for its own preservation. Their existence depends on holding their own in deadly strife with neighbouring tribes, and thus they put a social premium on the warrior's proof of valour in fight against the enemy, though in these degenerate days they allow the form to be meanly fulfilled by bringing in as a warrior's trophy the head of some old woman or wretched waylaid stranger. In this simple contrast between one's own people and strangers, the student will find a clue to the thought of right and wrong running through ancient history, and slowly passing into a larger and nobler view. The old state of things is well illustrated in the Latin word hostis, which, meaning originally stranger, passed quite naturally into the sense of enemy. Not only is slaying an enemy in open war looked on as righteous, but ancient law goes on the doctrine that slaying one’s own tribesman and slaying a foreigner are crimes of quite different order, while killing a slave is but a destruction of property. Nor even now does the colonist practically admit that killing a brown or black man is an act of quite the same nature as killing a white countryman. Yet the idea of the sacredness of human life is ever spreading more widely in the world, as a principle applying to mankind at large." Edward Burnett Tylor   "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   "To the eighteenth-century liberal, to the old-fashioned nineteenth-century liberal, that is to say to all professed liberals, brought up to be against the government on principle, this organised clairvoyance will be the most hateful of dreams. Perhaps, too, the individualist would see it in that light. But these are only the mental habits acquired in an evil time. The old liberalism assumed bad government, the more powerful the government the worse it was, just as it assumed the natural righteousness of the free individual." Herbert George Wells   "I am not a communist, because communism concentrates and causes all the forces of society to be absorbed by the state, because it necessarily ends in the centralization of property in the hands of the state, while I desire the abolition of the state—the radical extirpation of this principle of the authority and the tutelage of the state which, under the pretext of moralizing and civilizing men, has until now enslaved, oppressed, exploited, and depraved them." Mikhail Bakunin   "Politicians, one immediately feels, ought to be high-minded and committed to policies; they ought to 'talk sense' to voters rather than rely on empty slogans, selfish appeals, and political payoffs; elective officials ought to vote and act on the basis of conscience rather than at the dictate of party 'bosses.' But the choice is not a simple one. An amateur politics of principle may make the attainment of the certain highly-valued ends difficult or impossible, whereas politics of interest may, under certain circumstances, enable those ends to be realized much more easily. Institutions should be judged by the ends they serve, not by the motives of their members, and on this basis it is an open question whether the professional politician is not the person best equipped to operate a democratic government in a way that will produce desirable policies." James Quinn Wilson   "Stacking the deck in favour of the accused is not a perfect solution. It doesn't always work, and when it does the results can be decidedly unjust. But that strong preference for freeing the guilty over incarcerating the innocent is arguably the most civilised thing about us. The fact that it actually structures the proceedings in all our criminal courts, and that it has for two and a half centuries, is proof of our conviction in the lofty promises of our founding documents. It is the principle on which we must agree, and to which we must aspire. Indeed, to surrender it would lead us quickly backward, to a much more primitive and brutal society." Bret Weinstein   "To affirm that an Englishman has a right to his liberty is a truth which has been so clearly evinced, especially of late, that to spend time in illustrating this would be but superfluous tautology. But I query whether liberty is so contracted a principle as to be confined to any nation under heaven; nay, I think it not hyperbolical to affirm that even an African has equally as good a right to his liberty in common with Englishmen." Lemuel Haynes   "I have not the slightest feel of humility towards the public or to anything in existence but the eternal being, the principle of beauty and the memory of great men." John Keats   "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   "Whereas The Federalist asserts that a diversity of interest will always underlie the extended republic, Wilson contended that history would overcome such particularism with an increasing unity of mind. So for him, the latent causes of faction are not sown in the nature of man, or if they are, historical progress will overcome this human nature. With the unity of national sentiment, political questions become less contentious and less important. We cease to concentrate on the question of what should be done, and more on the question of how we should do it. This is the principle behind Wilson's suggestion that the modern age is one of administration, where we seek to find the specific means to achieving the ends that we all agree we want. Government in such an age of unity is not a threat to the individual that has to be checked; rather, the state is an organ of the individuals in society—'beneficent and indispensable,' as Wilson described it. The distinction and tension between the individual and government, a primary feature of early liberalism to which the American founders at least partly subscribed, are made largely extinct by the progress of history. Instead, the state becomes one with the unified will of the people; it becomes the organic manifestation of their spirit." Ronald Pestritto   "All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine." Woodrow Wilson