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| circa 300 B.C. ========= The chief beginning of evil is goodness in excess. -- Menander ========= circa 1800 ========= He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars, General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer … . – William Blake ========= 1835 ========= The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. – Alexis de Tocqueville ========= 1869 ========= The most melancholy of human reflections perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more harm than good. – Walter Bagehot ========= 1891 ========= It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done. – Oscar Wilde ========= 1914 ========= For the worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp. – Gilbert Keith Chesterton ========= 1919 ========= There is always the type of man who says he loves his fellow men, and expects to make a living at it. – Edgar Watson Howe ========= 1931 ========= The very act of sacrifice magnifies the one who sacrifices himself to the point where his sacrifice is much more costly to humanity than would have been the loss of those for whom he is sacrificing himself. – Andre` Gide ========= 1943 ========= Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. – Isabel Paterson ========= 1946 ========= The utopian sets up an ethical standard which purports to be independent of politics, and seeks to make politics conform to it. The realist cannot logically accept any standard of value save that of fact. – E. H. Carr ========= Mid-20th Century ========= Politicians are not people who seek power in order to implement policies they think necessary. They are people who seek policies in order to attain power. – Evelyn Waugh The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. – H. L. Mencken ========= 1955 ========= The radical error of the modern democratic gospel is that it promises, not the good life of this world, but the perfect life … . – Walter Lippmann ========= 1957 ========= Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. – Ayn Rand The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of “human rights” versus “property rights,” as if one could exist without the other, are making the last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property: only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. – Ayn Rand ========= 1958 ========= But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals with you—the social reformers—see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them. – Sir Isaiah Berlin ========= 1961 ========= Goodness, without wisdom, always accomplishes evil. – Robert A. Heinlein ========= 1964 ========= Some of the worst tyrannies of our day genuinely are “vowed” to the service of mankind, yet can function only by pitting neighbor against neighbor. – Eric Hoffer ========= 1974 ========= No hint of genuine charity ameliorates our vision of society, once sentimentalism has been laid [a]side. What passes for cooperation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation. Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed. – Michael Ghiselin ========= 1979 ========= This dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying and inhuman. And the moment it captures people’s minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood, accompanied by attempts to straighten the stooped and shorten the tall. – Vladimir Bukovsky ========= 1982 ========= The absence of utopianism in the Constitution, law, and traditional political culture has been … important in limiting expectations concerning what can be achieved by politics. The history of the last two centuries confirms what the framers of the Constitution understood: that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the search for unalloyed virtue in public life leads to unalloyed terror. – Jeane J. Kirkpatrick ========= 1989 ========= Emotionally healthy people are true to themselves and do not masochistically subjugate themselves to or unduly sacrifice themselves for others. They tend to put themselves first … . – Albert Ellis ========= | ||||
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