When the wicked are in authority, sin flourishes, but the godly will live to see their downfall.
Read moreKierkegaard on Self-Inventing Fools
This form of despair is: in despair not to will to be oneself. Or even lower: in despair not to will to be a self. Or lowest of all, in despair to will to be someone else, to wish for a new self. Immediacy actually has no self, it does not know itself; thus it…
Read moreKierkegaard on Self-Awareness
There is so much talk about human distress and wretchedness–I try to understand it and have also had some intimate acquaintance with it–there is so much talk about wasting a life, but only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or its sorrows that he never became decisevely…
Read moreKierkegaard on the Despair of Finitude
So it is with finitude’s despair. Because a man is in this kind of despair, he can very well live on in temporality, indeed, actually all the better, can appear to be a man, be publicaly acclaimed, honored, and esteemed, be absorbed in all the temporal goals. In fact, what is called the secular mentality…
Read moreKierkegaard on Being Base
[I]t is far from being the case that men regard the relationship to truth, relating themselves to the truth, as the highest good, at it is very far from being the case that they Socratically regard being in error in this manner as the worst misfortune–the sensate in them usually far outweighs their intellecutality. For…
Read moreMises on the Duty to Engage
There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a self-appointed elite of supermen. In such vital matters blind reliance upon “experts” and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to…
Read moreMises on War
Looking at conditions as they had developed under the system of limited warfare, philosophers found wars useless. Men are killed or maimed, wealth is destroyed, countries are devastated for the sole benefit of kings and ruling oligarchies. The peoples themselves do not derive any gain from victory. The individual citizens are not enriched if their…
Read moreMises on Democratic Justification
Whether such a system social security is a good or a bad policy is essentially a political problem. Once may try to justify it by declaring that the wage earners lace the insight and the moral strength to provide spontaneously for their own future. But then it is not easy to silence the voices of…
Read moreMises on the Fruits of Capitalism
The history of capitalism as it has operated in the last two hundred years in the realm of Western civilization is the record of a steady rise in the wage earners’ standard of living. The inherent mark of capitalism is that it is mass production for mass consumption directed by the most energetic and far-sighted…
Read moreMises on the Welfare State and Liberty
The contractual order of society is an order of right and law. It is a government under the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) as differentiated from the welfare state (Wohlfahrtsstaat) or paternal state. Right or law is the complex of rules determining the orbit in which individuals are free to act. No such orbit is left…
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