
“In the welfare state, experience teaches nothing.”
A Murderess’s Tale http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_oh_to_be.html (Winter 2005).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)
Closing sentence of the Preface to the general science (1677) (in P. Wiener (ed.), Leibniz Selections, Macmilland Press Ltd, 1951).
“In the welfare state, experience teaches nothing.”
A Murderess’s Tale http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_oh_to_be.html (Winter 2005).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)
7 February 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
Light (1919), Ch. XX The Cult
Context: The universal problem into which modern life, as well as past life, rushes and embroils and rends itself, can only be dispersed by a universal means which reduces each nation to what it is in truth; which strips from them all the ideal of supremacy stolen by each of them from the great human ideal; a means which, raising the human ideal definitely beyond the reach of all those immoderate emotions, which shout together "Mine is the only point of view," gives it at last its divine unity. Let us keep the love of the motherland in our hearts, but let us dethrone the conception of Motherland.
I will say what there is to say: I place the Republic before France. France is ourselves. The Republic is ourselves and the others. The general welfare must be put much higher than national welfare, because it is much higher.
“If it works against the general welfare, then it is treason against the fatherland.”
1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)
“Politicians always seemed to be willing to sacrifice the general welfare to win votes.”
Source: The Hercules Text (1986), Chapter 9 (p. 138)
More Diversity = Less Welfare? http://www.vdare.com/articles/more-diversity-less-welfare, VDARE, March 14, 2004
As quoted in De Natura Deorum by Cicero, ii. 8.; iii. 9.
1900s, Inaugural Address (1905)
Context: The conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being, which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial centers. Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn.
Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769)
1760s