“Men … are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when some one is heard denouncing the evils now existing in states, suits about contracts, convictions for perjury, flatteries of rich men and the like, which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, are due to a very different cause — the wickedness of human nature.”

Pale Fire (1962)

Henry Hazlitt, Thinking As A Science (1916).

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.11

Source: Henry V

p, 125
"On the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics" (Jan. 3, 1856)

Alan Moore on Anarchism (2009)
Context: Unless you’re talking about some incredibly rigid Victorian family, there is nobody that could be said to be the leader of the family; everybody has their own function. And it seems to me that anarchy is the state that most naturally obtains when you’re talking about ordinary human beings living their lives in a natural way. It’s only when you get these fairly alien structures of order that are represented by our major political schools of thought, that you start to get these terrible problems arising—problems regarding our status within the hierarchy, the uncertainties and insecurities that are the result of that. You get these jealousies, these power struggles, which by and large, don’t really afflict the rest of the animal kingdom. It seems to me that the idea of leaders is an unnatural one that was probably thought up by a leader at some point in antiquity; leaders have been brutally enforcing that idea ever since, to the point where most people cannot conceive of an alternative.

Illustrated London News (23 October 1909)

Cato the Elder
Roman Apophthegms

This Business of Living (1935-1950)