"The great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression."

Edmund Burke, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things February 2003 (crediting it to a letter from Nino Langiulli of Lynbrook, New York and calling it "an observation of the ever–quotable Edmund Burke with which I was not familiar").

“One general description of madness, it seems to us, might be found in the statement that madness is a preference for the symbol over that which it represents.”

G.K. Chesterton, “Lunacy and Letters,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

“Even if it were true that a hundred persons would experience more pleasure from torturing one person than that person would experience pain (in some dreadful utilitarian calculus), such an action would be an abomination. The person is never subordinate to the common good in an instrumental way. Persons are not means but ends, because of the God in Whom they live and Who lives in them.”

Michael Novak, Free Persons and the Common Good