“The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.”

Source: Darkness at Noon

Agnelli: The Rules of the Game, Vanity Fair (1991)

Psychedelic Society (1984)
Context: What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance. And [I think] that beliefs should be put aside, and that a psychedelic society would abandon belief systems [in favor of] direct experience and this is, I think much, of the problem of the modern dilemma, is that direct experience has been discounted and in its place all kind of belief systems have been erected... If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief.

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 34

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 21 (p. 276)

Against Authority: Freedom and the Rise of Surveillance States (2014)
Context: Any monitoring system that is invisible, pervasive, automatic, and permanent gives those in power the means to create a modern surveillance state. And these new states will have an authority that has detached itself from ethics and ideology. Politicians and dictators will continue to make speeches, but their words will become meaningless. This new system will see and know us. It will even predict our future behavior.

Source: Poverty (1912), p. 7

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 223
Context: This remarkable address conveys, more than any other contemporary document, not only the soul of the Confederacy but also of that Jim Crow South that arose from the ashes of the Confederacy. From the end of Reconstruction until after World War II, the idea of racial inequality gripped the territory of the former Confederacy, and not only of the former Confederacy, more profoundly than it had done under slavery. Nor is its influence by any means at an end. Stephens's prophecy of the Confederacy's future resembles nothing so much as Hitler's prophecies of the Thousand-Year Reich. Nor are their theories very different. Stephens, unlike Hitler, spoke only of one particular race as inferior. But the principle of racial domination, once established, can easily be extended to fit the convenience of the self-anointed master race or class, whoever it may be.

Illustrated London News (6 April 1918)