Daniel Hannan > Quotes

“The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude.”
― Daniel Hannan

“Canadian soldiers had a reputation for grim and terrible courage. Dwight D. Eisenhower used to remark (in private, obviously) that, man for man, they were the finest troops under his command.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“Liberty, in Milton’s mind, did not mean an absence of rules: this he called “license,” and heartily disliked. Liberty, rather, meant the freedom that comes from the virtuous and informed exercise of independent judgment.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer tells the queen: “I know we don’t call as often as we should, and we aren’t as well behaved as our goody-two-shoes brother Canada. Who by the way has never had a girlfriend. I’m just saying.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“The American,” he wrote, “is the Englishman left to himself.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“The more we learn of behavioral psychology, the more we understand that ideologies are as much a product of people’s nature as of observed experience. The perverted doctrines that actuated the Bolshevists may be immanent in a portion of humanity. Some people are determined to see every success as a swindling of someone else, every transaction as an exploitation, every exercise in freedom as a violation of some ideal plan, every tradition as a superstition. How delicious that, as we approach the bicentenary of his birth, Karl Marx should have turned into the thing he loathed above all: the prophet of an irrational faith.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“The Judges cannot make new law by new decisions; they do not assume a power of that kind: they only endeavour to declare what the common law is and has been from the time when it first existed.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“Charles, meanwhile, had started to raise funds in all manner of semiconstitutional and unconstitutional ways.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“We subconsciously pick the data that sustain our prejudices, and block out those that don’t. We can generally spot this tendency in other people; we almost never acknowledge it in ourselves.”
― Daniel Hannan, How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters

“The temptation, when reading history, is to assume that anything that represents a move toward our present values and institutions is progressive, and anything that represents a move the other way is backward. But, of course, the people we are studying have no notion of what the constitutional arrangements will be in our day. In 1649, as in 1941, democracy was seen as anything but a coming force. The progressive, radical, forward-looking idea was monarchical absolutism. All over Europe, representative assemblies—diets, councils, estates, and corteses—were being sidelined or scrapped altogether. Centralization was seen as a modern force, a tidying away of the various local particularisms that held countries back. The idea of a religious duty to a divinely appointed prince was very much in vogue—upheld as much by Lutherans and Calvinists as by Catholics.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“Elected parliaments, habeas corpus, free contract, equality before the law, open markets, an unrestricted press, the right to proselytize for any religion, jury trials: these things are not somehow the natural condition of an advanced society. They are specific products of a political ideology developed in the language in which you are reading these words. The fact that those ideas, and that language, have become so widespread can make us lose sight of how exceptional they were in origin.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“George Orwell wrote disparagingly of “the masochism of the English Left”: its readiness to ally with any cause, however vile, provided it was sufficiently anti-British. He cited the IRA and Stalinism. Had he been writing today, he’d doubtless have extended the critique to the American left and Islamism.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“Since majority voting was introduced in the late 1980s, the UK has voted against an EU legislative proposal seventy times. She has lost the vote seventy times.”
― Daniel Hannan, Why Vote Leave

“De’il gie ye colic, the wame o’ ye, fause thief! Daur ye say Mass in my lug?” (“The Devil give you colic in your stomach, you false thief! Do you dare to say a Mass in my ear?”)”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it, the storm may enter, the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement! —WILLIAM PITT THE ELDER, 1763”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“Britain is in a permanent minority because her interests and outlook diverge from the European mean more”
― Daniel Hannan, Why Vote Leave

“Nor should the Toryism of the defeated Loyalists be mistaken for statism or servility. Many had left the infant American Republic not because they were unthinking Royalists, but because they feared that mob rule would lead to socialism. As Daniel Bliss, a Massachusetts exile who later became chief justice of New Brunswick, put it, “Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away than a thousand tyrants one mile away.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“Britain is in a permanent minority because her interests and outlook diverge from the European mean more than those of any other state.”
― Daniel Hannan, Why Vote Leave

“Saying “I support the EU because I like Europe” is rather like saying “I support FIFA because I like football”.”
― Daniel Hannan

“greed”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“to the Eurocrat, “unregulated” is more or less synonymous with “illegal.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth, for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“One way to think of the EU is as a massive vehicle for the redistribution of wealth. Taxpayers in the states contribute (though their contributions are hidden among the national tax-takes) and the revenue is then used to purchase the allegiance of articulate and powerful groups: consultants, contractors, big landowners, NGOs, corporations, charities, municipalities.”
― Daniel Hannan, Why Vote Leave

“One of the reasons that the EU is stagnating while other advanced economies grow is because cronyism and protectionism flourish in the necessarily undemocratic Brussels institutions.”
― Daniel Hannan, Why Vote Leave

“The first thing that strikes the historian, as he surveys the written records of the Anglo-Saxons, is that they were a litigious people.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“times. As we lose sight of what the Anglosphere has achieved, we risk losing the institutions that have served to make it what it is.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“Once the American Revolution is understood as a civil war, much falls into place.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“In 2004, two economists at UCLA, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian, conducted a major study that concluded that the New Deal had in fact prolonged the recession by seven years.”
― Daniel Hannan, The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America

“Ireland, traditionally the other outlier, has long since passed its apastron, its moment of maximum orbital distance, from the rest of the English-speaking world.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

“As well as being tailored to the circumstances of the recipient, charity allows the donor to make a moral choice. There is virtue in deciding to give away your money, but none in having the same amount taken from you through the tax system.”
― Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World