Historically speaking, the most obvious and most decisive distinction between the American and the French Revolutions was that the... historical inheritance of the American Revolution was "limited monarchy" and that of the French Revolution an absolutism which apparently reached far back into the first centuries of our era and the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Nothing, indeed, seems more natural than that a revolution should be predetermined by the type of government it overthrows; nothing, therefore, appears more plausible than to explain the new absolute, the absolute revolution, by the absolute monarchy which preceded it, and to conclude that the more absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which replaces him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are... the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the "easy life of the gods" would be a lifeless life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and ...deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten ...to to the core.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very exi...stence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all... other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists..., there may be moods--moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former--but no opinion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood.... Wealth ...and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" ... has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or ...constitute a proof for its existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »