To Understand Is To Perceive

Those Who Have Ever Valued Liberty For Its Own Sake Believed That To Be Free To Choose, And Not To Be Chosen For, Is An Inalienable Ingredient In What Makes Human Beings Human.

But To Manipulate Men, To Propel Them Toward Goals Which You-the Social Reformers-see, But They May Not, Is To Deny Their Human Essence, To Treat Them As Objects Without Wills Of Their Own, And Therefore To Degrade Them.

Conformities Are Called For Much More Eagerly Today Than Yesterday... Skeptics, Liberals, Individuals With A Taste For Private Life And Their Own Inner Standards Of Behavior, Are Objects Of Fear And Derision And Targets Of Persecution For Either Side... In The Great Ideological Wars Of Our Time.

The Notion Of The Perfect Whole, The Ultimate Solution In Which All Good Things Coexist, Seems To Me Not Merely Unobtainable--that Is A Truism--but Conceptually Incoherent. ......some Among The Great Goods Cannot Live Together. That Is A Conceptual Truth. We Are Doomed To Choose, And Every Choice May Entail An Irreparable Loss.

The Intellectual Power, Honesty, Lucidity, Courage, And Disinterested Love Of The Truth Of The Most Gifted Thinkers Of The Eighteenth Century Remain To This Day Without Parallel. Their Age Is One Of The Best And Most Hopeful Episodes In The Life Of Mankind.