“Any system of ethics must account for scarcity. If it doesn’t, humanity would perish due to misallocation of finite resources, including one’s own body.”
― Private Property, Law, and the State
― Private Property, Law, and the State
“The only way for the state to finance its operations is through the forcible expropriation of productive wealth from its citizens.”
― Private Property, Law, and the State
― Private Property, Law, and the State
“It must be noted that the non-aggression alone can never be the starting point in justifying moral behavior or serving as a fundamental principle of ethics. There must be a justification of the non-aggression principle before such a case can be made. The very implication of the term “principle” implies that non-aggression serves as the foundation for a system of ethics, which it cannot be. It is certainly not an axiom since it is not a self-evident truth.”
― Private Property, Law, and the State
― Private Property, Law, and the State
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy”
― The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
― The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
“Men do not live in perfect harmony with each other. Rather, again and again conflicts arise between them. And the source of these conflicts is always the same: the scarcity of goods. I want to do X with a given good G and you want to do simultaneously Y with the very same good. Because it is impossible for you and me to do simultaneously X and Y with G, you and I must clash. If a superabundance of goods existed, i.e., if, for instance, G were available in unlimited supply, our conflict could be avoided. We could both simultaneously do ‘our thing’ with G. But most goods do not exist in superabundance. Ever since mankind left the Garden of Eden, there has been and always will be scarcity all-around us.”
― A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline
― A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline
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Blake’s 2025 Year in Books
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