Ken

“We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“This mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion not a question of the truth of doctrines, but of their usefulness; and flatters itself by that means to escape the responsibility of claiming to be an infallible judge of opinions.”
― Jonathan Haidt, All Minus One: John Stuart Mill's Ideas on Free Speech

“There is a tendency among regulators to act like Adam Smith’s “Man of System,” moving objects around on a chess board. The man of system … is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles … are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably. (Smith, 1759; pp. 233-234) The “game” may be hockey or public policy; the insight is the same. Unintended consequences may reduce, or even eliminate, the good you expect to result from a policy change. People aren’t chess pieces.”
― Michael Munger, Is Capitalism Sustainable?

“In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force,” Jefferson wrote in an 1824 letter, “the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.”
― C. Bradley Thompson, America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It