“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.”

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.

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.

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