“Four years ago a large part of the civilised world laboured under certain biological fallacies which may, in a sense, be held responsible for the extent and duration of the present conflict. These fallacies, which were the foundation of pacifism and other pernicious forms of social and political radicalism, dealt with the capacity of man to evolve mentally beyond his former state of subservience to primate instinct and pugnacity, and to conduct his affairs and international or interracial relations on a basis of reason and good-will. That belief in such capability is unscientific and childishly naive, is beside the question.”

At the Root (1918)
Non-Fiction

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H.P. Lovecraft203

American author 1890–1937

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“Our aim is not just to remove our uniquely incompetent Government from office—it is to destroy the socialist fallacies—indeed the whole fallacy of socialism—that the Labour Party exists to spread.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

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“The convictions of the multitudes — and on certain points like the desirability of organizing the world on a nationalist basis there is overwhelming agreement — are sincere convictions. They are, as we know, sometimes disastrously erroneous; but they are also disastrously honest. The Nationalisms, the Protectionisms, the Mercantilisms and all the other fallacies which rack Europe and create the chaos are sincerely held fallacies. They are, to these multitudes, the truth, and the prophet who denies them shall be stoned.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

“The hazardous part of the business is also the mere possibility, still to be admitted, that the ultimate insight into the nature of things attainable by man, into his very being and that of the world, might not coincide exactly with the doctrines which were in part made known to the former little race of the Jews and in part appeared in Jerusalem eighteen hundred years ago.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Das Bedenkliche bei der Sache ist auch bloß die doch einzuräumende Möglichkeit, daß die letzte dem Menschen erreichbare Einsicht in die Natur der Dinge, in sein eigenes Wesen und das der Welt nicht gerade zusammenträfe mit den Lehren, welche theils dem ehemaligen Völkchen der Juden eröffnet worden, theils vor 1800 Jahren in Jerusalem aufgetreten sind.
Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, p. 154, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 142
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“Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay - and claims a halo for his dishonesty”

Robert A. Heinlein book Double Star

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“The scientific skepticism of our age professes to spring from a sense of the extreme fallaciousness of the human senses, and the liability besetting us all to deceive ourselves into a belief which gratifies the faculty of wonder. It is held as a rare and valuable gift to be able to observe a fact correctly. We are pathetically told that what a man thinks he saw, is often a mere hypothesis of his imagination as to what he saw, and may be wholly wrong.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer

Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 1-2

“By 'socialism' I mean a classless society in which the State has disappeared, production is cooperative, and no man has political or economic power over another. The touchstone would be the extent to which each individual could develop his own talents and personality.”

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"The Root is Man" (1946).

“If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1964)
Context: Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time — the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts… Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

“The assertion fallacy … is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions.”

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Source: Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), P. 141.

“In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics and if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XXIX.

“If that happened, and if one political civilization were exchanged for another, as seemed to be happening, the impact might be felt worldwide by osmosis. This radical transformation would need the simultaneous occurrence of smaller revolutions—in politics, society, international and interracial relations, cultural values, and technology and science.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Five, The American Matrix for Transformation

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