Danger

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Source: Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1752)
Taken From: International Man, The Worst Advice You'll Ever Get, 2011/12/13

Opinion

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject. 

Source: Marcus Aurelius (Unsourced)
Taken From: International Man, Readers Respond 2011/12/05

Majoritarianism

Why should either two men live at the discretion of three, or three at the discretion of two. Both propositions are absurd from a reasonable point of view. If being a slave and owning a slave are both wrong relations, what different does it make whether there are a million slave owners and one slave, or one slave owner and a million slaves? Do robbery and murder cease to be what they are if done by ninety-nine percent of the population?

Source: Auberon Herbert, Unsourced
Taken From: Mises.org, Nov  16, 2011

Executioners

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

Source: Albert Camus (As quoted in Howard Zinn's The People's History)
Taken From: Antiwar.com Quotes

Life's Racecourse

Life's racecourse is fixed ... Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once

Source: Cicero, Unsourced
Taken From: Strauss and Howe, The Fourth Turning, 1997

The Prophet

...the mark of the prophet is to speak the truth in love with courage - come what may.

Source: Cornel West, The American evasion of philosophy: a genealogy of pragmatism, 1989
Taken From: Strauss and Howe, The Fourth Turning, 1997 pg231

Plato's Cave

Seen from another point of view, the "monopoly of mainstream media" is a translation into actuality of Plato's celebrated figure of the cave.  The defect of the prisoners, let us recall, is that they cannot perceive the truth.  The wall before them, on which the shadows play, is the screen on which press, motion picture, and radio project their account of life.  The chains which keep the prisoners from turning their heads are the physical monopoly which the engines of publicity naturally possess.  And is it not pathetically true that these victims, with their limited vision, are "in the habit of conferring honors among themselves to those who are the quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before and which followed after, and which were together"?

 Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

On Thinking about General Actions

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Source:  Alfred Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics, 1911
Taken From:  Friedrich Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society

On Origins

He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin... will obtain the clearest view of them.

Source: Aristotle (Politics: 24–25)
Taken From: Daniel J. D’Amico, The Prison in Economics: Private and Public Incarceration in Ancient Greece (PDF)

Spirit of Reverence

Let parents, then, bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence

Source:  Plato, Laws Book V
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

The Hardest Victory

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.

Source: Aristotle, may be a variant of "He who has overcome his fears will truly be free."
Taken From: Casey Research, 2011-08

Society and Wisdom

In this they bear out the observation of Socrates that society does not mind an individual's being wise; only when he begins to make others wise does it become apprehensive.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

On the Philosopher

Not only is the philosopher a notoriously poor consumer; he is also an unsettling influence on societies careless of justice.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Patriotism's Roots

...[T]he patriotism that is extolled to us as an ideal and sublime virtue by the poets, by politicians of every school, by governments, and by every privileged class, is rooted not in man’s humanity, but his animality.

Source:  Open Letter to Swiss Comrades, 1869 Mikhail Bakunin (Unconfirmed Source)
Taken From: Doug Casey, My Favorite Quotes

Natural Patriotism is...

Natural patriotism may be defined as follows: an automatic and wholly uncritical, instinctive attachment for hereditary or traditional ways of life which are collectively accepted, and an equally automatic and instinctive hostility toward any other way of living. It is love for one’s own, and a hatred for everything foreign.

Source:  Open Letter to Swiss Comrades, 1869 Mikhail Bakunin (Unconfirmed Source)
Taken From: Doug Casey, My Favorite Quotes

Scarcity and Abundance

One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today.

Source: Richard M. Weaver
Taken From: Ideas Have Consequences, Introduction, Pg14, 1948

Gardening

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

Source:  Henry David Thoreau
Taken From: PoemHunter.com; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, p. 55, Houghton Mifflin (1906)

Responsibility

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

Source: Herbert Spencer, State-Tamperings with Money and Banks, 1891
Taken From: Wikiquote, Herbert Spencer

Knowledge and Conciet

... it is impossible for a man to begin to learn what he has a conceit that he already knows

Source:  Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Taken From: The Art of Manliness Blog, Random Library of Man Knowledge

Liberty

Liberty, the Mother, not the Daughter, of Order.

Source:  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
Taken From:  Ralph Raico, Austrian Economics and Classical Liberalism at Mises.org, 03/04/2010