Joshua > Joshua's Quotes

“Ich glaube, daß der Mensch sein Leben ganz in allen seinen Handlungen von Eingebungen leiten lassen kann, und ich muß jetzt glauben, daß dies das höchste Leben ist. Ich weiß, daß ich so leben könnte, wenn ich wollte, wenn ich dazu den Mut hätte. Ich habe ihn aber nicht und muß hoffen daß mich das nicht zu Tode, das heißt ewig, unglücklich machen wird.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Public and Private Occasions

“He who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”
― Frederic Bastiat, The Law

“Don't steal - the government hates competition!

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― Ron Paul, End the Fed

“A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.”
― LYSANDER SPOONER

“If socialists understood economics they wouldn't be socialists.”
― Friedrich Hayek

“And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.”
― Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”
― Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

“Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.”
― Lysander Spooner

“If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.”
― Lysander Spooner

“If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.”
― Lysander Spooner

“A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime; whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions calling themselves a government.”
― Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

“The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life...The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful. The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber...Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful 'sovereign,' on account of the 'protection' he affords you.”
― Lysander Spooner

“If any man's money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists.”
― Lysander Spooner

“I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“We have all things and abound; not because I have a good store of money in the bank, not because I have skill and wit with which to win my bread, but because the Lord is my shepherd.”
― Charles Spurgeon

“I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles," he thought, with an odd smile. "Hm … yes, all is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”
― Ronald Reagan

“As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we supposed. And we ourselves are, too.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Know well that the enemy laboureth in all wise to stay thy desire in good and to make thee void of all good exercise.”
― Thomas Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

“There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“It is easy to be religious when religion is in fashion; but it is an evidence of strong faith and resolution to swim against a stream to heaven, and to appear for God when no one else appears for Him.”
― Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible

“It is a great happiness to be under the influence of the Holy Ghost.”
― Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible-Book of 1st John

“It is but for a moment, comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling -- a truth that has the bitter and the sweet in it.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables

“Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite of which—and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that had opened beneath my feet—there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“I am an aristocrat: I love liberty, I hate equality.”
― John Randolph