User:Quoth the Raven/Quotations

"The optimist in politics is an inconsistent and even dangerous man, because... [h]e frequently thinks that small reforms in the political constitution, and, above all, in the personnel of the government, will be sufficient to direct social development in such a way as to mitigate those evils of the contemporary world which seem harsh to the sensitive mind.... The pessimist regards social conditions as forming a system bound together by an iron law which cannot be evaded...."

— Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (emp. added)

"...[T]o expect reason as a direct product of the people and a direct result of their action is to deceive oneself by a chimera. It is not necessary for the existence of reason that everybody should understand it. And in any case, if such a dissemination of truth were necessary, it could not be achieved in a low-class democracy, which seems as though it must of its very nature extinguish any kind of noble training.

— Benito Mussolini (and/or Giovanni Gentile?), La Dottrina del fascismo (emp. added)

[On the subject of government] "To annihilate it or to submit it to the discussion of all individuals, is the same thing."

— Comte Joseph-Marie de Maistre, Study on Sovereignty (emp. added)

"The right of individuals to be subjectively destined to freedom is fulfilled when they belong to an actual ethical order, because their conviction of their freedom finds its truth in such an objective order, and it is in an ethical order that they are actually in possession of their own essence...."

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (emp. added)

"The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea.... The state is absolutely rational inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality. This substantial unity is an absolute unmoved end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right."

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (emp. added)

"To ask whether or not force ought to be used in a society, whether the use of force is or is not beneficial, is to ask a question that has no meaning...."

— Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society (emp. added)

"Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices me wherever I am or whatever I do."

— Epictetus, Discourses, Book 4, Chapter 7 (emp. added)