George H. Smith Quotes

Americans feared the Townshend Act for another reason: revenues raised form it were to be used to pay the salaries of colonial governors and judges. This proposal struck at the heart of a revered American tradition. Although the Crown appointed governors in all 11 colonies, their salaries were paid by the colonial legislatures. This ‘power of the purse’ enabled American assemblies to check the power of the governors and judges by withholding their salaries.

According to [Peter L.] Callero, ‘Freedom of choice and self-determination are virtuous principles, but when selfish individual interests threaten to destroy the common good, the limits of individualism are exposed.’ Unfortunately but predictably, Callero is vague when it comes to defining ‘the common good’—a catchphrase with many variations that has been used by murderous dictators throughout history. May we therefore say that the ‘common good,’ when pushed to extremes, results in the likes of Stalin and Hitler?

It is clear that 'social Darwinism' and 'survival of the fittest' were intended by Obama to evoke feelings of fear and disgust. It is highly doubtful that Obama knows anything about the history of these ideas, and it is even more doubtful that he cares. A concern for truth is not the coin of the political realm.

[G]overnment should only concern itself with matters of justice (i.e. the protection of rights) while leaving more tangential matters to the voluntary decisions and actions of individuals.

Religion has had the disastrous effect of placing vitally important concepts, such as morality, happiness and love, in a supernatural realm inaccessible to man’s mind and knowledge.

Taxes, then, are a necessary means for the maintenance of political power, so the laws, first and foremost, must enforce compulsory taxation.

The academic who lives comfortably in his professional enclave, secure in the belief that his corner of the cognitive world is the entire universe, has little need for philosophy, which he regards as a descent into idle speculation. Philosophy, for this academic, is an irritating enterprise, one that might call into question his most cherished assumptions.

There can be no knowledge of what is good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.

Christianity cannot erase man's need for pleasure, nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however, and what it has been extremely effective in accomplishing, is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure, when accompanied by guilt, becomes a means of perpetuating chronic guilt, and this serves to reinforce one's dependence on God. ** p. 308

We can see why Jefferson focused on inalienable rights in his effort to fasten the charge of tyranny on the British government. The violation of inalienable rights was a defining characteristic of a tyrannical government, and only against such a government is revolution justified.

To enumerate the particular details—the sufficient conditions—of a good society is effectively to prohibit individuality and social change. A planned society, a society in which sufficient conditions are politically determined and coercively imposed, is ‘closed’ to the spontaneous innovations of free association. We see this in the utopian writings of Plato and his many admirers. A utopian society is a perfect society, one that has been carefully designed by a wise and beneficent lawgiver. Any deviation from perfection must necessarily be for the worse, so social change—which in this scheme is but another name for social degeneration—must be arrested at all costs. And this, in turn, requires the suppression of individuality. The individual’s pursuit of happiness—that powerful and unpredictable agent of social change—must be subordinated for the sake of a good society, as specified in the utopian blueprint of sufficient conditions.

Government should only protect individual; beyond that it should leave individuals free to cultivate themselves, and thereby generate spontaneous cultural order.

Reason is not one tool of thought among many, it is the entire toolbox. To advocate that reason be discarded in some circumstances is to advocate that thinking be discarded—which leaves one in the position of attempting to do a job after throwing away the required instrument.

In the late nineteenth century, liberals in Europe and America discovered that they were victims of a linguistic coup. They found that they were no longer regarded as liberals per se but as old liberals – a qualification that had bed foisted upon them by self-proclaimed new liberals.

It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands, on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his reason, is contradicting himself.