Quotes about private
page 3

“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

“[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

Life, Personality

“Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book Herland

Source: Herland

“I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Love, People, Way, Feeling

“Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude.”

Mary Balogh (1944) Welsh-Canadian novelist

Source: Simply Magic

Soul

“but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Solitude

“So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope….”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Dreams, Hope, Soul, Distant

“The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.”

Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993) American journalist

“God enters by a private door into every individual.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

God

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

World

“Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

Memory, Personality

“I can’t feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.”

Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena

Source: Letters to Milena

Feeling, Spring, Dance

“It's important to have your private enjoyments because sometimes that's all we have.”

Kay Ryan (1945) American poet

“I know you guys are living out your own private Romeo and Juliet love story, but remember: Both of them die in Act V.”

Sara Shepard (1973) Author

Source: Ruthless

Love, Guy

“It’s the final word in camouflage. Forget chucking weights around. Peeta should have gone into his private session with the Gamemakers and painted himself into a tree. Or a boulder. Or a muddy bank full of weeds.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Tree, Painting, Forgetting

“Science replaces private prejudice with publicly verifiable evidence.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Enemies of Reason, "The Irrational Health Service"
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)

Science

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Context: I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

Men, Heart

“Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Education, Parent, Success

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Literature, Memory

“We don't have to reveal everything to each other. It's OK to be private. It's OK to say no. It's OK to say, 'I'm not going to share that.”

Sophie Kinsella book Finding Audrey

Source: Finding Audrey

“Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched".”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Happiness, Motivation, Personality

“A book is as private and consensual as sex.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005)

Books, Sex

“Each of us wages a private battle each day between the grand fantasies we have for ourselves and what actually happens.”

Cathy Guisewite (1950) Cartoonist

“My past was a private obstacle, not a public excuse.”

Kelley Armstrong book Stolen

Source: Stolen

Past

“and he would probably not agree with my conviction that a sense of humor is the main measure of sanity. But who can say for sure? Humor is a very private thing.”

Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Source: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Sense

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 7

Children, Thinking

“There was a yell, but Magnus had already risen and closed the door before he could see Alec fall down the steps, as that was the sort of thing a man had to do in private.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Course of True Love [and First Dates]

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Fate, Thinking

“When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

“She taught me I should never do anything in private I did not want talked about in public, and cautioned me not to talk in my sleep.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Sleep

“When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”

Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993) American journalist

Business, Support, Success

“Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.”

Siri Hustvedt book The Summer Without Men

Source: The Summer Without Men

Reading

“An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.”

Tom Stoppard Travesties

Carr, Act I
Source: Travesties (1974)

Universe, Indifference

“After all, in private, we're all misfits”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

“It's odd how different a house feels when one is alone in it. It makes it easier to think rather private thoughts…”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

Feeling, Thinking, Housing

“We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

World, Peaceful

“We are Sinclairs. Beautiful. Privileged. Damaged. Liar. We live, least in the summertime, on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts. Perhaps that is all you need to know.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

Beauty

“The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

“If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: A Wallflower Christmas

Secret, Learning, Past, Country

“… it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

Nature, Suffering

“AMANDA: I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Source: Private Lives an Intimate Comedy in Three Acts

People, Thinking

“For some unknown reason, success usually occurs in private, while failure occurs in
full view.”

Jill Shalvis (1963) American writer

Source: The Sweetest Thing

Failure, Success

“Me, I was still in the pygmy hippo in a skirt, singing lusty songs about Solomon's private life and a giant stone back and forth through the air as I climbed out of the quarry at the edge of the site.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Ring of Solomon

Source: The Ring of Solomon

Life, Singing

“I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.”

Robert James Waller The Bridges of Madison County

Source: The Bridges of Madison County

Dreams, Feeling, Time

“Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

As quoted in the United States of America Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 105th Congress Second Session, Government Printing Office, Vol. 144, Part 4, p. 5738 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nEI6WcjH8ykC&pg=PA5738 Post-war years (1945–1955)

People, Horse

“But every once in a while, from out of the blue, someone reaches the quiet place where you spend your private time and changes the way you see yourself”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Avenged

Way, Change, Time

“It became known that I had a rather fertile imagination, when it came to private activities."
She stared. "What sort of private activities?"
This time he did smile, and it turned his face wicked. "Disrobe, and I'll be happy to demonstrate.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: On the Edge

Happiness, Smile, Imagination, Time

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Source: Walden and Other Writings

“The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the inherent instability of the private enterprise system, is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of a country.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Source: (1962), Ch. 3 The Control of Money, p. 50

Men, Parting, Country

“We need books… because we are all, in the private kingdoms of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend.”

Steve Almond (1966) American writer

Books, Heart

“The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my books," Miranda said. "It's like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

Hate, People, Truth, Books

“If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

William James Is Life Worth Living?

"Is Life Worth Living?"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Life, Feeling, Game, Universe

“The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right to not agree, not to listen, and not to finance one's own antagonists.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Source: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

Freedom

“According to the Bible, God created the heavens and the Earth. It is man’s prerogative - and woman’s - to create their own particular and private hell.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Source: The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories

God, Hell

“The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.”

Fannie Flagg (1944) American actress, comedian and author

Source: Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

Life, Behavior

“I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Source: The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Law, Revenge, Thinking

“I have a private theory, Sir, that there are no heroes and no monsters in this world. Only children should be allowed to use these words”

Alfred De Vigny book Stello

Source: Stello

Children, World

“Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Bullet

Source: Bullet

Fight

“So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book

“She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

People, Music, Singing, Housing

“My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.”

Marya Hornbacher (1974) American journalist

Source: Madness: A Bipolar Life

Reality

“I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

“The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 280.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Life

“The powers inherent in man are his intelligence and his physical capacity for work. Those which arise from the condition of society consist of the capacity to divide up labour and to distribute different jobs amongst different People … and the power to exchange mutual services and the products which constitute these means. The motive which impels a man to give his services to another is self -interest- he requires a reward for the services rendered. The right of exclusive private property is indispensable to the establishment of exchange amongst men… Exchange and division of labour reciprocally condition each other.”

Fryderyk Skarbek (1792–1866) Polish noble

Fryderyk Skarbek (1828), cited in: Karl Marx. Human Requirements and Division of Labour https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm, Manuscript, 1844.

Men, People, Intelligence, Motivation

“The decline of Indian Buddhism was centrally due to the fact that it never offered the Indian laity a complete religion. Early Buddhism knew no ceremonies for birth and death, marriage, illness, and other critical turns of private life… Only for the community of monks did Buddhism provide a complete and well-defined way of life. …But Brahmins were needed for all the ordinary crises in life, ready with their rites and sacred formulas to ward off danger or minimize the damage. This elemental fact assured the survival of Brahminism in India.”

William H. McNeill book The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community

The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963)

Life, Death, Marriage, Religion

“The prohibition of the expression of the sex drive, i. e., between consenting adults in private, lies outside the legal sphere.”

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) German jurist, writer and pioneer of LGBT human rights

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. The riddle of "man-manly love": the pioneering work on male homosexuality, Volume 2, Prometheus Books, 1994. p. 604

Sex

“In the United States, we’ve long had a free market system, but that system is not what it once was. Total government spending–state, federal, and local–has grown in real terms by more than 400 percent since 1965. Government spending is now one-third of the economy. As the private economy retreats, the importance of a new marketplace grows: the political marketplace. Products and services are no longer judged according to their usefulness to the economy at large–they’re judged according to whether or not they are politically useful or connected. The political marketplace is the marketplace of crony capitalism. Its supply and demand are lobbying expenditures and the resulting federal program or carve out. Its actors are not firms, but the political class and the politicians they influence”

Ted Budd (1971) American politician

Rep. Budd: The Political Market vs. the Private Market http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/02/rep-budd-political-market-vs-private-market/ (May 2, 2017)

“Here in the UK, we've now got an evangelical television channel — it's the kind of thing that will be very familiar to everyone in the United States, especially if you've ever turned on your TV set on a Sunday morning, and seen one holy man after another, urging you to send money so that Jesus can buy a new Cadillac. Apparently, Jesus can't save the world until he's been properly kitted out with a million-dollar mansion, and a private jet — some small print in the Gospels that we must have missed.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"In Jesus' name" (25 April 2007) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qZO2u-jDNpQ 2007

Money, World

“The major cuts in federal and provincial transfers to social service agencies, health care, education, and social housing over the past several years have not bee matched by an explosion in private giving. Nor will they ever be.”

Bob Rae (1948) Canadian politician

Source: The Three Questions - Prosperity and the Public Good (1998), Chapter Five, The Second Question: Charity and Welfare-The Old Debate Is New Again,, p. 91

Health, Education, Bee, Past

“Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.”

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

Henry, Act I, scene II
The Real Thing (1982)

“State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Quoted from “The Labor Charter: The Corporate State and its Organization”, promulgated by Mussolini's Grand Council of Fascism, Article 9, (April 21, 1927) Copy found in Mediterranean Fascism 1919-1945, Charles F. Delzell, The MacMillan Press, (1971) p. 122. Also in Benito Mussolini’s “Doctrine of Fascism”, published as “Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions” (1935), Rome: Ardita Publishers, p.135-136.
1920s

“The private ownership of great art, its seclusion from the general view of men and women, let alone from that of interested amateurs and scholars, is a curious business. The literal disappearance of a Turner or a Van Gogh into some Middle Eastern or Latin-American bank vault to be kept as investment and collateral, the sardonic decision of a Greek shipping tycoon to put an incomparable El Greco on his yacht, where it hangs at persistent risk — these are phenomena that verge on vandalism.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"The Cleric of Treason".
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

Women, Men, Art, Business

“The proposition has… been laid down in the most general terms, "All evils are negations." Thus for man death is evil; death is his non-existence. Illness, poverty, and ignorance are evils for man; all these are privations of properties…. The destruction of other things is likewise nothing but the absence of their form. After these propositions, it must be admitted as a fact that it cannot be said of God that He directly creates evil, or He has the direct intention to produce evil; this is impossible. His works are all perfectly good. He only produces existence, and all existence is good; whilst evils are of a negative character, and cannot be acted upon.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.10

Death, God, Evil

“I have little interest in the "conscientious objector"; but I have the greatest regard for the individual thinker. The former opposes private conviction to public policy. His inflexibility is symptomatic of will and emotion, rather than enlightenment. The latter opposes freedom of thought to uniformity of opinion.”

Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) American philosopher

The Integrity of the Intellect (July 1920)

Freedom

“Our complex society relies on proxy violence to the extent that many average people in the private sector can wander through life without really having to understand or think deeply about violence, because we are removed from it. We can afford to perceive it at a distant, abstract problem solved through high-minded strategy and social programming. When violence comes a knocking, we simply make a call, and the police come to "stop" the violence.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Violence is golden
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

Life, People, Understanding, Problem

“The protections offered to private landowners are a lot like having the French on your side in war – largely symbolic.”

David A. Ridenour

National Center for Public Policy Research press release, July 26, 2005.
Referring to the initial draft of an Endangered Species Act reform bill.

War

“There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter V, Section 42, p. 268

Law

“Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

As quoted in The Sunday Herald http://web.archive.org/web/20071112125539/http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1824217.0.norman_mailer_1923_2007.php [Scotland] (11 November 2007)

Life, Sex, Failure

“We can put cybersecurity first if we just make sure the next secretary of state doesn't have a private server.”

Mike Pence (1959) 48th Vice President of the United States

Vice presidential debate (October 4, 2016)
Vice presidential debate (October 4, 2016)

“Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime… It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, weather the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or Constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States Government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit—murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and connivance.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

Source: On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays (1928), p. 143

Exercises, Fraud, Revenge, Nature

“Two years before the war the then Government of Lord Oxford was confronted with an epidemic of strikes. The quarrel of one trade became the quarrel of all. This was the sympathetic strike…In the hands of one set of leaders, it perhaps meant no more than obtaining influence to put pressure on employers to better the conditions of the men. But in the hands of others it became an engine to wage what was beginning to be called class warfare, and the general strike which first began to be talked about was to be the supreme instrument by which the whole community could be either starved or terrified into submission to the will of its promoters. There was a double attitude at work in the same movement: the old constitutional attitude…of negotiations, keeping promises made collectively, employing strikes where negotiations failed; and on the other hand the attempt to transform the whole of this great trade union organization into a machine for destroying the system of private enterprise, of substituting for it a system of universal State employment…What was to happen afterwards was never very clear. The only thing clear was the first necessity to smash up the existing system. This was a profound breach with the past, and in its origin it was from a foreign source, and, like all those foreign revolutionary instances, it has been very largely secretive and subterranean. This attitude towards agreements and contracts has been a departure from the British tradition of open and straight dealing. The propaganda is a propaganda of hatred and envy.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Chippenham (12 June 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 164-165.
1926

Men, War, Secret, Communication

“"In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," instead of "life, liberty and property." With that vagueness, Jefferson undermined the foundation of civilization: private property right."”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

2010s, 2016

Life, Happiness

“It was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America – an idea about the way people should govern themselves. Some people make the mistake of calling that idea ‘democracy’ and imagining that any country can adopt it merely by holding elections. In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law – to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government.”

Niall Ferguson book Civilization: The West and the Rest

Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011)

People, Law, Way, Democracy

“If you defend a behavior by arguing that people are programmed directly for it, then how do you continue to defend it if your speculation is wrong, for the behavior then becomes unnatural and worthy of condemnation. Better to stick resolutely to a philosophical position on human liberty: what free adults do with each other in their own private lives is their business alone. It need not be vindicated — and must not be condemned—by genetic speculation.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"So Cleverly Kind an Animal", p. 267
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

People, Behavior, Business

“Is it wise to say to men of rank and property, who, from old lineage or present possessions have a deep interest in the common weal, that they live indeed in a country where, by the blessings of a free constitution, it is possible for any man, themselves only excepted, by the honest exertions of talents and industry, in the avocations of political life, to make him-self honoured and respected by his countrymen, and to render good service, to the slate; that they alone can never be permitted to enter this career? That they may indeed usefully employ themselves, in the humbler avocations of private life, but that public service they never can perform, public honour they never shall attain? What we have lost by the continuance of this system, it is not for man to know. What we may have lost can more easily be imagined. If it had unfortunately happened that by the circumstances of birth and education, a Nelson, a Wellington, a Burke, a Fox, or a Pitt, had belonged to this class of the community, of what honours and what glory might not the page of British history have been deprived? To what perils and calamities might not this country have been exposed? The question is not whether we would have so large a part of the population Catholic or not. There they are, and we must deal with them as we can. It is in vain to think that by any human pressure, we can stop the spring which gushes from the earth. But it is for us to consider whether we will force it to spend its strength in secret and hidden courses, undermining our fences, and corrupting our soil, or whether we shall, at once, turn the current into the open and spacious channel of honourable and constitutional ambition, converting it into the means of national prosperity and public wealth.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1813/mar/01/mr-grattans-motion-for-a-committee-on in the House of Commons in favour of Catholic Emancipation (1 March 1813). 1810s

Life, Men, Secret, Education

“What all this amounts to, then, is that the Rule of Law requires that administrative discretion in coercive action (i. e., in interfering with the person and property of the private citizen) must always be subject to review by an independent court which is not an instrument of, or even privy to, the aims of current governmental policy; that its review must in all such instances extend to the substance of the administrative act and not merely to the question whether it was infra or ultra vires; and that, if such a court finds that the rights of private citizens have been infringed, it will assess damages just as if the right of this person had been violated by another private citizen. This, in addition to the familiar requirements of generality, equality, and certainty of the law is really the crux of the matter, the decisive point on which it depends whether the Rule of Law prevails or not.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Lecture III. The Safeguards of Individual Liberty - 19. Fundamental Rights and the Protected Private Sphere
1940s–1950s, The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law (1955)

Law, Question, Decision, Dependency

“One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2004-06-21
Unfairenheit 9/11
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/unfairenheit_911.html
2000s, 2004

Hope, Problem, Time, Success

“Secret: A private matter whispered abroad and never kept to oneself. By naming it a secret, we immediately indicate its presence. If we really wanted to keep secrets, we would not have a name for them.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

Secret

“Our basic problem is that we have three levels, I would say, of moral beliefs. We have the first instance, our intuitive moral feelings which are adapted to the small, person-to-person society where we act for people whom we know and are served by people whom we know. Then, we have a society governed by moral traditions which, unlike what modern rationalists believe, are not intellectual discoveries of men who designed them, but as a result of a persons, which I now prefer to describe as term of 'group selection.' Those groups who had accidentally developed such as the tradition of private property and the family who did succeed, but never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition which the intellectual does not approve of, because it has never been intellectually designed and it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs, those which the morals which the intellectuals designed in the hope that they can better satisfy man's instincts than the traditional morals to do. And we live in a world where three moral traditions are in constant conflict, the innate ones, the traditional ones, and the intellectually designed ones, and ultimately, all our political conflicts of this time can be reduced as affected by a conflict between free moral tradition of a different nature, not only of different content.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

in 1985 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11AXDT5824Y with John O'Sullivan 1980s and later

Men, People, World, Family

“[I believe in] the throne…parliamentary institutions…private enterprise and individual opinion against the socialization of the state…equity in the distribution of public burdens and strict maintenance of public faith with the creditors of the state [and] a fresh guarantee of peace by an alliance with France and…Belgium for the defence of our common interests against unprovoked attack.”

Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937) British politician

Speech to the Oxford Carlton Club (3 March 1922), quoted in Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920-1924: The Beginnings of Modern British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 147.
1920s

Peace, Faith