“The straightening board was created because of warped wood, and the plumb line came into being because of things that are not straight. Rulers are established and ritual and rightness are illuminated because the nature is evil.”

Part I, CH 2: Chamberlain, p. 32
The Killer Angels (1974)

The Never-Ending Wrong (1977)
Context: In 1935 in Paris, living in that thin upper surface of comfort and joy and freedom in a limited way, I met this most touching and interesting person, Emma Goldman, sitting at a table reserved for her at the Select, where she could receive her friends and carry on her conversations and sociabilities over an occasional refreshing drink. She was half blind (although she was only sixty-six years old), wore heavy spectacles, a shawl, and carpet slippers. She lived in her past and her devotions, which seemed to her glorious and unarguably right in every purpose. She accepted the failure of that great dream as a matter of course. She finally came to admit sadly that the human race in its weakness demanded government and all government was evil because human nature was basically weak and weakness is evil. She was a wise, sweet old thing, grandmotherly, or like a great-aunt. I said to her, "It's a pity you had to spend your whole life in such unhappiness when you could have had such a nice life in a good government, with a home and children."
She turned on me and said severely: "What have I just said? There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be."
I closed my eyes and watched Nietzsche's skull nodding.

Outside (1955)

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)
Context: Suddenly, however, remedies for something called 'racism' became the order of the day. The word itself, like 'sexism', is of recent coinage and will not be found in any older dictionaries. The civil rights movement, premised upon individual rights, suddenly became the black power movement, premised upon group rights. 'Affirmative action' became a euphemism for the baldest kind of racial discrimination. That whites had long enjoyed preference over blacks was now taken to be a justification for blacks having preference over whites. What was lost sight of was that the evil of the past, whether of slavery or of Jim Crow, was evil not because it was done by whites to blacks, but because it was done by some human beings to other human beings. The purpose of the law was to end evil acts, not continue them in the guise of 'affirmative action'.

since it is at odds with itself, and since it does not tolerate any lasting principle within itself

Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 246
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 137

Source: The Name of the Wind