I Demand From You In

Every Man Whose Business It Is To Think Knows That He Must For Part Of The Day Create About Himself A Pool Of Silence.

For The Most Part We Do Not First See, And Then Define, We Define First And Then See. In The Great Blooming, Buzzing Confusion Of The Outer World We Pick Out What Our Culture Has Already Defined For Us, And We Tend To Perceive That Which We Have Picked Out In The Form Stereotyped For Us By Our Culture.

A State Is Absolute In The Sense Which I Have In Mind When It Claims The Right To A Monopoly Of All The Force Within The Community, To Make War, To Make Peace, To Conscript Life, To Tax, To Establish And Disestablish Property, To Define Crime, To Punish Disobedience, To Control Education, To Supervise The Family, To Regulate Personal Habits, And To Censor Opinions. The Modern State Claims All Of These Powers, And, In The Matter Of Theory, There Is No Real Difference In The Size Of The Claim Between Communists, Fascists, And Democrats.

If All Power Is In The People, If There Is No Higher Law Than Their Will, And If By Counting Their Votes, Their Will May Be Ascertained - Then The People May Entrust All Their Power To Anyone, And The Power Of The Pretender And The Usurper Is Then Legitimate. It Is Not To Be Challenged Since It Came Originally From The Sovereign People.

Inevitably Our Opinions Cover A Bigger Space, A Longer Reach Of Time, A Greater Number Of Things, Than We Can Directly Observe. They Have, Therefore, To Be Pieced Together Out Of What Others Have Reported And What We Can Imagine.