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

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.

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

Thomas Gordon, founder of P.E.T. (Parent Effectiveness Training), observed that when children are behaving in a way that interferes with your ability to meet your needs, shouting direct orders to them doesn’t work very well.

For time flows on, and if it did not, it would be a bad prospect for those who do not sit at golden tables.

If, of course, one builds into the concept of an ‘individual’ all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom.

Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no fruit; it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment. I love because I love; I love in order that I may love.

Every person is endowed with God-given abilities, and we must cultivate every ounce of talent we have in order to maintain our pinnacle position in the world.

For me, dressing is always a question of principle, respect, a sense of order, not to disguise myself, even in rotten places.

You can find examples of how little we value ourselves everywhere you look. The signs on the front of the convenience stores where Stephen lives in Florida tell the story. Beer, ice, bread and milk are the big come-ons.

I don’t think I could be a foot soldier. I don’t know if I could take orders too good. I’m a little lazy.