“Once a person exists, not everything compatible with his overall existence being a net plus can be done, even by those who created him. An existing person has claims, even against those whose purpose in creating him was to violate those claims.”

Robert Nozick; Anarchy, State, and Utopia

  • “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

    - Immanuel Kant; Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals

  • “Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry... no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

    - Thomas Hobbes; Leviathan

  • "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."

    - Joseph Conrad

  • “A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them. Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.”

    - Friedrick Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  • "A dream of tenderness wrestles with all I know of history."

    - Adrienne Rich; From an Old House in America

  • “Utilitarians are often immensely conscientious people, who work for humanity and give up meat for the sake of the animals. They think this is what they morally ought to do and feel guilty if they do not live up to their own standard. They do not, and perhaps could not, ask: How useful is it that I think and feel like this?”

    - Bernard Williams; Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

  • "Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed."

    - Henry Miller; The Wisdom of the Heart

  • "The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting."

    - Charles Bukowski

  • “The first and fundamental law of Nature, which is, to seek peace and follow it.”

    - Thomas Hobbes; Leviathan

  • "The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims."

    - Joseph Conrad; Under Western Eyes

  • “... while transparency is a natural associate of liberalism, it falls short of implying rationalism. It is one aspiration, that social and ethical relations should not essentially rest on ignorance and misunderstanding of what they are, and quite another that all the beliefs and principles involved in them should be explicitly stated. That these are two different things is obvious with personal relations, where to hope that they do not rest on deceit and error is merely decent, but to think that their basis can be made totally explicit is idiocy.”

    - Bernard Williams; Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy