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The structural conditions of the servile mind as it expresses itself in conduct ... are to be found in the structures that protect people from victimhood, which are simultaneously an education in how to be a victim. And one of the collateral corruptions of this situation is that the control must often be exercised not against those who commit whatever offense is in question, but against those who might conveniently be made accountable. An employer, for example, may become accountable for sexual harassment committed by an employee because he has not provided what is known as a “safe environment” for women.... More generally, the duty not to offend the vulnerable classes today in speech has been codified as the amorphous thing called “political correctness,” and such codification makes the codifiers our masters whom we must obey not because it is the law, but because they are our masters. Such is a servile relationship. Codification of this kind removes the situational freedom with which citizens in what is recognizably a civil relationship ought to be free to respond to each other.
— Kenneth Minogue
The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life
(New York: Encounter Books, 2010); pages 6–7.

 
 
*          *          *
 
Truth is commoner than articles of furniture. It cries out in the streets and does not turn its back on us when we turn our backs on it. Ideas emerge from facts; they also emerge from conversations, chance occurrences, theaters, visits, strolls, the most ordinary books. Everything holds treasures, because everything is in everything, and a few laws of life and of nature govern all the rest.

... Every fact may give rise to a great thought. In all contemplation, even that of a fly or of a passing cloud, there is a fit occasion for endless reflection. Every light striking on an object may lead up to the sun; every road opened is a corridor to God.

— A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.
The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods
(Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1980); page 75.

 
 
*          *          *
 
[The] conservative element in American society [of 1781–1787] had learned a bitter lesson at the hands of the radicals. They too could call conventions. They too could paint dark pictures of the times and blame the supposed woes of the country on the Articles of Confederation, as the radicals had blamed the British government before 1776. They too could, and did, adopt the radical theory of the sovereignty of the people; in the name of the people they engineered a conservative counter-revolution and erected a nationalistic government whose purpose in part was to thwart the will of “the people” in whose name they acted. They too could use one name while pursuing a goal that was the opposite in fact. Thus, although the purpose of the conservatives was “nationalistic,” they adopted the name “Federalist,” for it served to disguise the extent of the changes they desired. True, the government they created had a good many “federal” features, but this was so because the conservatives were political realists and had to compromise with the political reality of actual state sovereignty.
— Merrill Jensen
The Articles of Confederation:
An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the
American Revolution 1776–1781

(Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940, 1970); page 245.

 
 
*          *          *
 
Where, in scattered places, [the fur trade’s] effects were beginning to be felt, it led to strange cultural inversions. In Newfoundland first, then in Nova Scotia, in Maine, on the shores of the St. Lawrence waterway, and south along the east coast, the market for furs, initiated randomly by the first European traders, grew with increasing velocity at the end of the sixteenth century, in ways that could not be accommodated within the natives’ traditional culture. No new skills were required to collect furs, but the trapping of large numbers of small fur-bearing animals whose pelts brought the best return took much time and effort, especially when the most obvious sources were exhausted, and it did not produce the nutrition provided by larger game. Concentration on fur hunts upset the ancient pattern of shifting seasonal activities, led to the neglect of horticulture, and since women were increasingly involved in the preparation of pelts, disturbed the traditional division of labor between the sexes. Further, a new and disruptive sense of territoriality was engendered in those who competed for both control of the richest trapping grounds and exclusive relationships with trading stations, where rivalries meant lower prices. Competition led to bickering, then to skirmishes, then to warfare among peoples otherwise peaceful. Here and there along the coast and at the mouths of the interior river systems, wherever the early fur traders were active, local groups were beginning to organize into hitherto unknown combinations to control the trade, and sought to become monopolists and middlemen to the inland fur-producing tribes. So certain groups among the Eastern Abenakis joined to control the trade of the Penobscot drainage, the Narragansetts took control in Rhode Island, the Pequots in Connecticut, the Mahicans on the Hudson, and the Susquehannocks in the Delaware Valley. The wars that erupted between these middlemen and their inland suppliers led to population concentrations in fewer but larger palisaded villages; and the conflicts were self-intensifying. Loss of warriors and the captivity of women and children touched off retributive “mourning wars” and gradually, among the Iroquois, an increase in the incidence and savagery of cannibalism....

It was the start of a degenerative spiral. As more and more effort was devoted to hunting for furs, and horticulture was less strenuously pursued, the traditional dietary balances were increasingly upset. So the health of the whole regions was placed at risk, and when the first, still peripatetic Europeans brought with them unfamiliar diseases, the result was the first wave of massive epidemics....

Yet however disturbing these signs of decay, change, and social pathology, they were only scattered through the fringes of an immense territory that was still largely traditional, still familiar. The question for the leaders of the native American people on the eve of the English settlements — still confident, still hopeful for the future — was not how to destroy the invaders and wipe out the pathologies they brought with them, but how to use the strangers and their goods within the traditional culture, how to absorb the apparent benefits of European civilization, which they had so far found merely attractive but which would soon become useful, and ultimately indispensable.

— Bernard Bailyn
The Barbarous Years:
The Peopling of British North America:
The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); pages 30–31.
 
 
*          *          *
 
[There] is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
— Walter Lippmann
The Good Society
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1936); page 90;
quoted in Don Lavoie, National Economic planning: What Is Left?
(Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1985);
page 230; also page 165, note 19.
 
 
*          *          *
 
A collectivity cannot have anything which its constitutive elements refuse to give up.
— John Chamberlin
“Introduction,” to
Frank Chodorov, One Is a Crowd
(New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1952); page xi.
 
 
*          *          *
 
A lordly culture never appears in history as the result of peaceful accumulation of goods.
— Fritz Kern
Die Anfänge de Weltgeschichte
(Leibzig, 1933; page 119);
quoted in Alexander Rüstow,
Freedom and Domination: A Historical Critique of Civilization
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981
[Salvatore Attanasio, trans.; Dankwart A. Rustow, ed.]); page 7.
 
 
*          *          *
 
If no one calls his own ideas “racism” and its only application is to a body of ideas considered to be untrue and evil, then it has no use other than as a kind of fancy curse word, the purpose of which is simply to demonize anyone who expresses the ideas it is supposed to describe.
— Sam Francis
“The Origins of ‘Racism’: The Curious Beginnings of a Useless Word”
in Sam Francis,
Essential Writings on Race
(New Century Foundation, 2007); page 73.
 
 
*          *          *
 
The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people. If the people or race who created and sustained the civilization of the West should die, then the civilization also will die. A merely cultural consciousness, then, that emphasizes only social and cultural factors as the roots of our civilization is not enough, because a merely cultural consciousness will not by itself conserve the race and people that were necessary for the creation of the culture and who remain necessary for its survival. We need not only to understand the role of race in creating our civilization but also to incorporate that understanding in our defense of our civilization.
— Sam Francis
“Why Race Matters”
in Sam Francis,
Essential Writings on Race
(New Century Foundation, 2007); pages 14–15.
 
 
*          *          *
 
Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he heeled over — a weary, battered old brontosaurus — and became extinct.
— Malcolm Muggeridge
“The True Crisis in Our Time”
St. Michael Broadcasting, transcript; June 1, 2013.

 
 
*          *          *
 
[After the United States declared war on Japan in 1941, for] four or more years, Americans lived under pervasive wartime controls and compulsory labor assignments. Big business got sweet-heart military-industrial contracts....

A new pattern set in for the duration. We still live under it, having never since had a genuine peacetime economy or real demobilization. Life never went back to what we used to call normal. One reason is that the noninterventionist or peace party is discontinuous and short of memory; another is that the war party (bipartisan since the 1950s) has had continuous institutional existence since at least 1938.

— Joseph R. Stromberg
“The New Deal, Part 2: Foreign Policy”
Future of Freedom, December 2016; pages 29, 33.

 
 
*          *          *
 
Wherever it was established, Byzantine domination proved despotic, meddlesome, and spoliatory; in Africa it needed but five years to elapse after the “liberation” by Belisarius for the exactions of the Byzantine governor to make men regret the passing of the Vandals; in Italy, people asked themselves which was preferable: Gothic terror, Lombard terror, or Byzantine taxation!
— Henri Daniel-Rops
Cathedral and Crusade
John Warrington, trans.
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957); page 402.

 
 
*          *          *
 
“On the Spanish Inquisition”
PDF Excerpts from William Thomas Walsh
Characters of the Reformation on the Inquisition
(New York: TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., 1987); pages 165–68, 69, 70.

 
 
*          *          *
 
[The] committed alterationists [those who think the Zapruder film was altered in some way] represent the final, inevitable outcome of decades of scrutiny and excessive faith in the power of the Zapruder film to tell us what happened to President Kennedy. They want every anomaly explained, every inconsistency resolved, every doubt tied up in a seamless narrative. but life isn’t like that.... For this school of thought, there is no simple human error, or failure of memory, or unanticipated outcomes of decisions made in haste.
— Alexandra Zapruder
Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film
(New York: Twelve, 2016); pages 355–56.

 
 
*          *          *
 
[Unless] history is read in considerable detail it not only raises more questions than it answers, and risks all the time being a distortion or a caricature of the truth, but is horribly dull and dreary work. Who is there who ever got any any satisfaction, for example, out of these terrible survey courses of the history of our civilization, one massive (splendidly produced) volume that begins with the Egyptians (and earlier) and tells us all about it, down to the conventions of the 1960s? What a dreadful prostitution of a great branch of learning! What a fraud on the young people! There are no short cuts in history; from the nature of the matter there cannot be.
— Msgr. Philip Hughes
The Church in Crisis: A History of the General Councils, 325–1870
(Garden City, New York: Hanover House, 1960); page 367.

 
 
*          *          *
 
Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book.
— Amos Tversky
Quoted in Michael Lewis,
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017); page 347.

 
 
*          *          *
 
In Britain at least, heroin addicts do not become criminals because they are addicted (and can raise funds to buy their drugs only by crime); those who take heroin and indulge in criminal behavior have almost always indulged in extensive criminal behavior before they were ever addicted. Criminality is a better predictor of addiction than is addiction of criminality.
— Anthony Daniels
“The Worldview That Makes the Underclass”
Imprimis, June 2014
 
 
*          *          *
 
Markets and economies are part of the natural world. They have to breathe in and breathe out. Their lungs fill with ambition and optimism. Then, they must exhale, blowing out the mistakes and disappointments.
— Bill Bonner
Cometh the “Exterminating Angel”
Bill Bonner’s Diary, February 16, 2017
 
 
*          *          *
 
Whites are 33 percent of [New York City’s] population, but they commit fewer than two percent of all shootings, four percent of all robberies, and five percent of all violent crime. These disparities mean that virtually every time the police in New York are called out on a gun run — meaning that someone has just been shot — they are being summoned to minority neighborhoods looking for minority suspects.

... This incidence of crime means that innocent black men have a much higher chance than innocent white men of being stopped by the police because they match the description of a suspect. This is not something the police choose. It is a reality forced on them by the facts of crime.

— Heather Mac Donald
“The Danger of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Movement”
Imprimis, April 2016
 
 
Comment from a reader: There is another point to be made about drug arrests. Blacks are many times more likely than whites to be picked up for robbery, for example. When they are arrested they are always searched for drugs, et cetera, and if they have drugs on them, that is another charge added to the indictment. Therefore, blacks could have drug-use rates exactly the same as whites, police could be enforcing drug laws with scrupulous race neutrality, but blacks would still have higher drug-offense rates.

 
*          *          *
 
No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well. Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.
— Winston Churchill
“Fifty Years Hence”
Strand Magazine, December 1931
 
 
*          *          *
 
I do nobody harm, I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.
St. Thomas More
at his trial, quoted in
Hughes, Msgr. Philip,
A Popular History of the Reformation
(Garden City, New York: 1957); pages 201–202.
 
 
*          *          *
 
The goal of the welfare state is not to make people happy, as people themselves understand their own happiness; instead, it is to make them “happy” in ways their superiors think they should be happy.
— James Bovard
“Obamacare Reform and Paternalism’s Pratfalls”
Future of Freedom, April 2017; page 13.
 
 
*          *          *
 
[By the turn of the 20th century] the advance of democracy in the Western World diminished popular fears of strong government and heightened national feelings.
— Arthur A. Ekirch Jr.
Progressivism in America
(New York: New Viewpoints, 1974); page 6.
 
 
*          *          *
 
The danger of landslides is that the catastrophe develops unnoticed, from day to day; underground waters gradually wash the base of the subsoil, and there has only to be a slight shaking of the earth, thunder or heavy rain, before the mountain begins slowly and relentlessly to flow downwards. An ordinary earth fall happens unexpectedly and suddenly. The landslide moves threateningly, and there is no force which can stop it. Something very much like this can happen with a man, when he is left on his own with his irresistible conflicts; he struggles, his soul so shattered that he cannot tell his troubles to anyone, because there is no one on earth in a position to either help or even understand him. He knows this, it frightens him. And this weighs down on him ...
— Chingiz Aitmatov
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years
John French, trans.
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1980); page 227.
 
 
*          *          *
 
The first legacy of these years [1917–1923] ... was a radical reversal of the long-standing ambition of European policymakers since the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to tame armed conflicts by distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants, and by de-criminalizing the enemy as a iustus hostis. In the internal and international armed conflicts discussed in this book, and again in the civili wars and inter-state wars from the mid-1930s onwards, by contrast, opponents were often portrayed and perceived as criminalized and dehumanized enemies undeserving of mercy or military restraint. The distinctions between civilians and combatants, already blurred during the First World War, completely vanished in this type of conflict. It is no coincidence that both during the period between 1918 and 1923 and again from the 1930s, the number of civilians murdered in armed conflicts exceeded those of soldiers killed.
— Robert Gerwarth
The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016); pages 254–55.
 
 
*          *          *
 
The young’s sympathy for the Negro and the poor goes hand in hand with an elitist conceit that pits them against the egalitarian masses. They will fight for the Negro and the poor but they have no use for common folk who work and moonlight to take care of their own.... They reserve their wrath for the institutions in which common people are most represented: unions, Congress, the police, and the army....

The militant young are not as formidable as they seem. Many of them, stoned and decked out in peacock finery, are on the way to the ashcan. A paean to the young sounds hollow when you watch their gongs-on in cities and on campuses. Should America come into the keeping of militant youth — white and black — we would have a vast Haiti, total integrated, totally chaotic and stagnant, and lorded by a Doc Duvalier and the Tontons Macoutes.

— Eric Hoffer
First Things, Last Things
(New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1967–71); pages 66–67.
 
 
*          *          *
 

Philosophy by its nature has to be based only on that which is available to the knowledge of any man with a normal mental equipment Philosophy is not dependent on the discoveries of science; the reverse is true.

So whenever you are in doubt about what is or is not a philosophical subject, ask yourself whether you need a specialized knowledge, beyond the knowledge available to you as a normal adult, unaided by any special knowledge or special instruments. And if the answer is possible to you on that basis alone you are dealing with a philosophical question. If to answer it you would need training in physics, or psychology, or special equipment, etc., then you are dealing with a derivative or scientific field of knowledge, not philosophy.

— Ayn Rand (Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff, eds.)
Introduction to Objectivist Philosophy
(New York: NAL Books, 1990; second expanded edition); page 289.
 
 
*          *          *
 

Economic life, ulike natural life, is ot subject to the law of causality. In natural life the same causes always produce the same effects. In economic life the same causes may produce different effects. Why? Because man’s volition interferes betweene causes and effects. Ad man’s volition is not ruled by causes (past), but by aims (future). Events in human life are not ruled by the law of causality, but by that of finality. We can judge natural eventsstartingfrom the two fundamental categories of Kant: time and place. In humanevents a third category interenes: action.... Acton is the product of man’s elective faculty. Confronted with facts, which in nature would be causes, man chooses and consequently acts....

— Faustino Ballvé
“On Methodology in Economics,” in Mary Sennholz, ed.,
On Freedom and Free Enterprise
(Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1956); page 129.
 
 
*          *          *
 

The man who proposes a new definition for an important word must prove his case....

— Murray Rothbard
“Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics” in Mary Sennholz, ed.,
On Freedom and Free Enterprise
(Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1956); page 241.
 
 
*          *          *
 

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, “Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.” These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when "one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state."

Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.

But it could not be so embarrassed, and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme.

— Garet Garrett
“The Revolution Was,”
in Garet Garrett, The People’s Pottage
(Boston: Western Islands, 1965 [copyright Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1953], page 9. Boldface is mine.
The entire text is available at here.)
 
 
*          *          *
 

It’s also necessary to completely falsify history ... to make it look as if when we attack and destroy somebody we’res really protecting and defending ourselves against major aggressors and monsters and so on.

When you have total control over the media and the educational system and scholarship is conformist, you can get that across.... [the] picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies. It’s all been a marvelous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom.... It’s not like a totalitarian state, where it’s done by force. These achievements are under conditions of freedom.

— Noam Chomsky
Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 1991, 1997; pages 30–32.)
(Chomsky was treating the Left as in a struggle against the State, but his remarks are equally applicable when the Left is the State.)
 
 
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