“It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program – on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off – than on any positive task.”
Friedrich Hayek The Road to Serfdom
In my latest National Post column I once again use the front page of the newspaper to show the hazards, across a broad range of issues, of entrusting power to sanctimonious fools instead of competent well-rounded people with common sense.
“A man who shows no resentment at being slapped is overwhelmed with insults and forced into need.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“a sleeping fool may pass for a wise man.”
One of the minor villains in Sax Rohmer The Trail of Fu Manchu
“Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot/ That it do singe yourself.”
Shakespeare, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“For it is the nature of the many to be ruled by fear rather than by shame, and to refrain from evil not because of the disgrace but because of the punishments. Living under the sway of their feelings, they pursue their own pleasures and the means of obtaining them, and shun the pains that are their opposites; but of that which is fine and truly pleasurable they have not even a conception, because they have never had a taste of it.”
Aristotle Ethics
“I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.”
Charles Dickens, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail June 20, 2000
“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking the compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.”
Joan Didion Slouching Toward Bethlehem