“The shuffle only demonstrated people’s fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition.”

Travis McGee series, (1970)

Source: Political Treatise (1677), Ch. 1, Introduction

"Belief and Creativity" Address in Hamburg (11 April 1980); as quoted in Moving Target https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=2SwUAAAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s (2013), Faber & Faber
Context: Reason, when it is refined into logic, has something to offer but only in terms of itself and depends for its effect and use on the nature of the premise. That useful argument as to how many angels can stand on the point of a needle would turn into nothing without the concept of angels. I took a further step into my new world. I formulated what I had felt against a mass of reasonable evidence and saw that to explain the near infinite mysteries of life by scholastic Darwinism, by the doctrine of natural selection, was like looking at a sunset and saying "Someone has struck a match". As for Freud, the reductionism of his system made me remember the refrain out of Marianna in Moated Grande — "He cometh not, she said, she said I am aweary aweary, O God that I were dead!". This was my mind, not his, and I had a right to it....
We question free will, doubt it, dismiss it, experience it. We declare our own triviality on a small speck of dirt circling a small star at the rim of one countless galaxies and ignore the heroic insolence of the declaration. We have diminished the world of God and man in a universe ablaze with all the glories that contradict that diminution.
Of man and God. We have come to it, have we not? I believe in God; and you may think to yourselves — here is a man who has left a procession and gone off by himself only to end with another gasfilled image he towns round with him at the end of the rope. You would be right of course. I suffer those varying levels or intensities of belief which are, it seems, the human condition. Despite the letters I still get from people who believe me to be still alive and who are deceived by the air of confident authority that seems to stand behind that first book, Lord of the Flies, nevertheless like everyone else I have had to rely on memories of moments, bet on what once seemed a certainty but may now be an outsider, remember in faith what I cannot recreate.

Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 1 The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom, 2002 edition, page 10
Context: Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like : the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era.
History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

"Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money" (1919)

"The Lesser Evil" (Penquin, 2004) Pg. 144

Now Let Us Address the Main Question: Bicentennial of What?, New York Times (3 July 1976)