James

“All the methods of appointing authorities that have been tried, divine right, and election, and heredity, and balloting, and assemblies and parliaments and senate—all have proved ineffectual. Everyone knows that not one of these methods attains the aim either of entrusting power only to the incorruptible, or of preventing power from being abused. Everyone knows on the contrary that men in authority—be they emperors, ministers, governors, or police officers—are always, simply from the possession of power, more liable to be demoralized, that is, to subordinate public interests to their personal aims than those who have not the power to do so. Indeed, it could not be otherwise.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You

“Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake - and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“We shall never know now whether Nazism, the concentration camps or Hiroshima were intelligible or not: we are no longer part of the same mental universe. Victim and executioner are interchangeable, responsibility is diffrangible, dissoluble - such are the virtues of our marvellous interface. We no longer have the strength that forgetting gives: our amnesia is an amnesia of the image. Since everyone is guilty, who will declare an amnesty? As for autopsy, no one believes any longer in the anatomical accuracy of the facts: we have only models to work on. Even supposing the facts lay shining bright before our eyes, they would still not have the power to prove or convince. Consider how continual scrutiny of Nazism, of the gas chambers and so on, has merely rendered them less and less comprehensible, so that it has eventually become logical to ask an incredible question: 'But, in the last reckoning, did all those things really exist?' The question is perhaps an intolerable one, but the interesting thing here is what it is that makes it logically possible. And in fact what makes it possible is the media's way of replacing any event, any idea, any history, with any other, with the result that the more we scrutinize the facts, the more carefully we study details with a view to identifying causes, the greater is the tendency for them to cease to exist, and to cease to have existed.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena