Nathan Long

“The crux of past political utopias is that voluntary participation was never intended. Almost all of the classic utopian ideas are basically totalitarian, starting with Plato and his philosopher kings to Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat and going right up to the current idea of a Great Transformation because of climate change.7 An enlightened minority gets its way, regardless of whether everyone or anyone else thinks it's a good idea or not. If this minority is replaced by a democratic majority, only the number of people who are being governed against their will changes, not the principle behind the scheme.”
― Titus Gebel, Free Private Cities: Making Governments Compete For You

“This was a religious problem, my father felt; people can want to be deceived. Do not deceive, the Kotzker rebbe insisted, and that also means do not deceive oneself by being gullible.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thunder in the Soul: To Be Known By God

“There is a war raging between good and evil in our world, and though we might prefer the conflict to be fought somewhere else, we don’t get to pick the times in which we live. The front lines today are battles over sex, gender, and identity. We must be ready for a fight in precisely these places. Don’t underestimate the power of your opponent. The devil wants us to join him in his rebellion against God. He wants to make us cowards and traitors. He wants us to believe the myth of our own autonomy. He wants us to raise the white flag and side with the enemy—the enemy without or the enemy within, it doesn’t matter to him.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

“Let’s look at a passage from Atomic Habits, by James Clear: “Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the first person says, “No thanks. I’m trying to quit.” It sounds like a reasonable response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying around the same beliefs. The second person declines by saying, “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.” It’s a small difference, but this statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone who smokes.”
― Luke Tatum, Between the Lies: How to Reclaim Your Future from the Banks and Wall Street