“But there are no institutions on earth which enable each separate person to have a hand in the exercise of Power.”

Ransack the history of revolutions, and it will be found that every fall of a regime has been presaged by a defiance which went unpunished. It is as true today as it was ten thousand years ago that a Power from which the magic virtue has gone out, falls.

Sooner or later, a society of sheep must create a government of wolves.

The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.

For Power is command, and everyone cannot command. Sovereignty of the people is, therefore, nothing but a fiction, and one which must in the long run prove destructive of individual liberties.

Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny’s incubation.

Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: We are our own Huns.

Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience.

Dancing is such a despised and dishonored trade that if you tell a doctor or a laywer you do choreography he’ll look at you as if you were a hummingbird.

Nothing that rest on some contradictory basis shall succeed or last in the long run (“ne saurait réussir ou durer, à la longue”, Fr.); all that involve (or imply…) a contradiction is fatally destined, early or late, to disintegrate and disappear.

You need people with brain and heart and soul that give it all. You need young people on skateboards and you need people running around making noise.

I love lawyers and bankers, they are my family, but I don’t want to live with them. It doesn’t make a city.

Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.

I was the kid growing up who would play with G.I.