It is passing strange that our philosophers of the Revolutionary period should have formed their conception of a free society by reference to societies where everyone was not free - where, in fact, th...
Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for constructi...
Ransack the history of revolutions, and it will be found that every fall of a regime has been presaged by a defiance which went unpunished. It is as true today as it was ten thousand years ago that a...
Power changes its appearance but not its reality.
We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superflu...
The idea so commonly found that scepticism leads to toleration arises from considering the effects of scepticism in the intellectual who takes no active part - not its effects in the man of action. In...
The more routine that systematised activities are, the more nearly they are of the monotonous character seen in the habits of social animals and the less necessary are master builders; the more novel...
The law of all modern states takes account of associations, whose members, in theory, pursue the common end with equal zeal. The experience of all associations proves, however, that this is not the ca...
The man who has dedicated himself to the success of the protect, the master builder, no longer has any freedom: his conduct is now determined altogether by the constraining force of the end. Logically...
Of all the simplifications to which the human spirit naturally inclines, unable to reconcile itself to the complexity of the real, there is none more dangerous than the attempt to integrate the whole...
It is as futile and dangerous to aim at making of society one large family, as sentimental socialism seeks to do, as to aim at making of it one large team, as positivist socialism seeks to do.
Rejoicing in his absolute authority, the single egoist will exploit it methodically, whereas a mêlée of egoists will bring about a ruinous disorder and a disastrous cleavage, because the contrariety o...
The modern absolutism, which we find the most natural thing in the world, would have been quite beyond the dreams of the most absolute of kings.
These observations bring out the fact that, whenever liberty is regarded merely as the power to do something which it is desired to do, the tyrant need only base himself on the desires of the masses t...
The entire stock of relationships which suited in war—militiae—was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace—domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experien...
