Ben > Ben's Quotes

“Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The crucial question is not whether evils exist but whether the evils of the past or present are automatically the cause of major economic, educational and other social disparities today. The bedrock assumption underlying many political or ideological crusades is that socioeconomic disparities are automatically somebody's fault, so that our choices are either to blame society or to 'blame the victim.' Yet whose fault are demographic differences, geographic differences, birth order differences or cultural differences that evolved over the centuries before any of us were born?”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“...lifelong benefits [to students who learn to think for themselves] include a healthy skepticism towards political slogans and a healthy desire to check out the facts before repeating rhetoric on other issues.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“When John Rawls, in his A Theory of Justice repeatedly referred to outcomes that 'society' can 'arrange,' these euphemisms finessed aside the plain fact that only government has the power to override millions of people's mutually agreed transactions terms. Interior decorators arrange. Governments compel. It is not a subtle distinctions.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“The time is long overdue to count the costs of runaway rhetoric and heedless accusations - especially since most of the costs, including the high social cost of a breakdown of law and order, are paid by vulnerable people for whose benefit such rhetoric and such accusations are ostensibly being made.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“People who depict markets as cold, impersonal institutions, and their own notions as humane and compassionate, have it directly backwards. It is when people make their own economic decisions, taking into account costs that matter to themselves, and known only to themselves, that this knowledge becomes part of the trade-odds they choose, whether as consumers or producers.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Despite the inability to confiscate and redistribute human capital, nevertheless human capital is - ironically - one of the few things that can be spread to others without those with it having any less remaining for themselves. But one of the biggest obstacles to this happening is the 'social justice' vision, in which the fundamental problem of the less fortunate is not an absence of sufficient human capital, but the presence of other people's malevolence. For some, abandoning that vision would mean abandoning a moral melodrama, starring themselves as crusaders against the forces of evil. How many are prepared to give up all that - with all its psychic, political and other rewards - is an open question.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Wrongs abound in times and places around the world - inflicted on, and perpetrated by, people of virtually every race, creed and color. But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the word as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Any serious consideration of the world as it is around us today must tell us that maintaining common decency, much less peace and harmony, among living contemporaries is a major challenge, both among nations and within nations. To admit that we can do nothing about what happened among the dead is not to give up the struggle for a better world, but to concentrate our efforts where they have at least some hope of making things better for the living.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“When a society is advancing in some respects, usually it is declining in others.”
― Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives

“There is no such thing as a General Will (the delusion of Rousseau) or the Virtue of the Proletariat (the delusion of Marx) or the Rational Citizen (the delusion of John Stuart Mill). No mysterious wisdom abides in the bosom of the People to which we can appeal in this hour of our need. The public is not going to protest against stupid television programs or hysterical newspapers or the decay of our schools. The public, or the masses, have no mind or coherence, accurately speaking. In our time, the public takes what it is given.”
― Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives

“The thinking conservative knows that the outward signs of disorder, personal or social, very often are no more than the symptoms of an inner ravaging sickness, not to be put down by ointments and cosmetics. He is inclined to look for the real causes of our troubles in the heart of man - in our ancient proclivity toward sin, in a loneliness of spirit that conjures up devils, in twisted historical roots beneath the parched ground of modern existence, in venerable impulses of human nature which, when frustrated, make our life one long lingering death. He knows, moreover, that the task for the prudent counselor and the prudent statesman is to make life tolerable, not to make it perfect.”
― Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives

“We all have real obligations toward our fellow-men, for it was ordained by Omniscience that men should live together in charity and brotherhood. A just society, guided by these lights, will endeavor to provide that every man be free to do the work for which he is best suited, and that he receive the rewards which that work deserves, and that no one meddle with him. Thus cooperation, not strife, will be the governing influence in the state; class will not turn against class, but all men will realize, instead, that a variety of occupations, duties, and rewards is necessary to civilization and the rule of law.”
― Russell Kirk

“Tradition is a guide to the permanent qualities in society and thought and private life which need to be preserved in one form or another, throughout the process of inevitable change.”
― Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives

“Most men and women are good only from habit, or out of deference to the opinions of their neighbors, the friend to tradition argues; and to deprive them of their habits, customs, and precepts, in order to benefit them in some novel way, may leave them morally and socially adrift, more harmed by their loss of ethical sanctions than helped by the fancied new benefit.”
― Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives

“Power without foresight leads to disaster.”
― Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans

“War, undertaken for even justifiable purposes, has often had the principal results of wrecking the country intended to be saved and spreading death and destruction among an innocent civilian population. War should never be undertaken or seriously risked except to protect American liberty.”
― Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans

“We cannot adopt a foreign policy which gives away all of our people's earnings or imposes such a tremendous burden on the individual American as, in effect, to destroy his incentive and his ability to increase production and productivity and his standard of living. We cannot assume a financial burden in our foreign policy so great that it threatens liberty at home.”
― Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans

“[T]he forcing of any special brand of freedom and democracy on a people, whether they want it or not, by the brute force of war will be a denial of those very democratic principles which we are striving to advance.”
― Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans

“I do not think this moral leadership ideal justifies our engaging in any preventive war, or going to the defense of one country against another, or getting ourselves into a vulnerable fiscal and economic position at home which may invite war. I do not believe any policy which has behind it the threat of military force is justified as part of the basic foreign policy of the United States except to defend the liberty of our own people.”
― Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans

“No foreign policy can be justified except a policy devoted without reservation or diversion to the protection of liberty of the American people, with war only as the last resort and only to preserve that liberty.”
― Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans

“True freedom depends on local self-government, effective access of the people to their individual rights. Sometimes I question whether the United States has not reached the limit of size under which the people of a nation can have a real voice in its government.”
― Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans

“The truth is that no nation can be constantly prepared to undertake a full-scale war at any moment and still hope to maintain any of the other purposes in which people are interested and for which nations are founded.”
― Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans

“Individualism leads not to freedom, but to the absence of maturity or character; it leads us to retreat into an intensely private world, a tiny space in which we may exercise our singular, feckless will.”
― Ted V. McAllister, Coming Home: Reclaiming America's Conservative Soul

“All ideologies are characterized by abstract and universal claims that are suited to a narrow rationalism but ill-suited to human experience.”
― Ted V. McAllister

“American conservatism is best characterized as the process of identifying, articulated, and refining principles both gleaned by natural reason and revealed by Jewish and Christian scriptures, but perfected and specified as norms growing out of English, and then American, experiences.”
― Ted V. McAllister, Coming Home: Reclaiming America's Conservative Soul

“Few principles are more important to American conservatism than the need to love the particular and the flawed over the abstract and apparently perfect.”
― Ted V. McAllister, Coming Home: Reclaiming America's Conservative Soul

“To the extent we look to some distant government to tend to our character and needs, we lose the habits of face-to-face involvement, cooperation, and conflict in which we learn to respect ourselves and other people. We lose the essential, concrete communities in which we become something more than individuals: real persons participating in associations where we belong and have purpose.”
― Ted V. McAllister, Coming Home: Reclaiming America's Conservative Soul

“All political projects that neglect human nature and disregard the lessons drawn from centuries of political experience have to compensate for their lack of realism by a disproportionately high degree of intervention in both the social fabric and in human minds.”
― Ryszard Legutko, The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols

“Despite philosophical fantasizing about self-sufficient individuals, human beings need a deep belonging and the more they are individualized, the more they are eager to assimilate collective identities - even absurd ones - without realizing to what extent their self-proclaimed individual sovereignty is illusory”
― Ryszard Legutko, The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols