Front matter
Reading edition
BY IRVING BABBITT Author of “Rousseau and Romanticism,” “The Masters of Modern French Criticism,” “The New Laokoon,” etc. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY IRVING BABBITT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED SECOND IMPRESSION, JANUARY, 1925 The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S A.
Such legislation [against private property] may have a specious appearance of benevolence; men readily listen to it, and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody’s friend, especially when some one is heard denouncing the evils now existing in states, ... which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, are due to a very different cause—the wickedness of human nature.
Aristotle: Politics, 1263b, 11.
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.
Burke: Letter to a member of the National Assembly.
The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism or unlimited sovereignty or absolute power is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor—equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical.
John Adams: Letter to Thomas Jefferson (13 November, 1815)
Den einzelnen Verkehrtheiten des Tags sollte man immer nur grosse weltgeschichtliche Massen entgegensetzen.
Goethe: Sprüche.