Thomas Blackwood @followingdra@qoto.org

I have also been extremely cautious about taking revolutionary “ideologies” at anything like their face value. I have found that the façade of ideology counts for little; it is the too, too solid flesh of the human material behind it that really counts.
-AJ Nock

type. In this country, for example, unseating predatory and scampish Republicans to give place for predatory and scampish Democrats, and vice versa, has long proved itself not worth the trouble of holding an election.

If every jobholder in Washington were driven into the Potomac tonight, their places would be taken tomorrow by others precisely like them. Nor have I any more respect for what the Duke of Wellington called “a revolution by due course of law” than I have for one of the terrorist

Passing from the tyranny of Charles I to the tyranny of Cromwell is like taking a turn in a revolving door; the exertion merely puts you back where you started.

Like Ibsen and Henry George, I have little respect for political revolutions, for I never knew of one which in the long-run did not cost more than it came to. Beheading a Louis XVI to make way for a Napoleon seems an unbusinesslike venture, to say the least of it.

In each of these, strictly according to pattern, they made it their first business to surround themselves with a high-tariff wall and order up a first-class army.

innumerable Pilsudskis, Horthys, Kerenskys, Masaryks, Beneshes, big and little, and kept them working tooth and nail to provide pasturage for themselves in a mishmash of little twopenny succession-states.

"Economism then had a clear field. The European spirit was everywhere promptly replaced by the spirit of an unintelligent, myopic, dogged, militant, political and economic nationalism, and the war of 1914 fixed this spirit upon Europe forever, as far as one can see."

Not for nothing had Europe gone through its long, intensive experience of the doctrine that man does not live by bread alone, that the whole content of human life can not be summed up in the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth. America had no such fund of experienc

"I knew I had nothing to contribute to our society that it would care to accept. The only contribution it would care for was something that might helpfully fall in with its doctrine of economism, and I had nothing of that sort to offer."

Again, what about the enormous psychical “spread” between Socrates, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, on the one hand, and on the other hand the Akka, the Australian bushman?

How was it, for example, that I could find no shred of respectable evidence that psychically the masses of mankind had budged a single peg in six thousand years?

"I dismissed all interest in public affairs, and have regarded them ever since as a mere spectacle, mostly a comedy, rather squalid, rather hackneyed, whereof I already knew the plot from beginning to end. "

Who wants to be a millionaire?
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/11/03/zimbabwe.money/

He was the only person I knew in that period who drew the line of distinction sharply between the idea of government, as set forth by Mr. Jefferson in the Declaration and amplified by Paine and Spencer, and the idea of the State

[Herbert] Quick clearly saw the State as an anti-social institution; he saw that as primarily the arbiter of economic advantage and a potential instrument of exploitation, both its initial intent and function are anti-social.