“The lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognising and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”
― The Theory of Moral Sentiments
― The Theory of Moral Sentiments
“War, in short, concentrated the mind. It had proven possible to convert a whole country into a war machine around a war economy; why then, people asked, could something similar not be accomplished in pursuit of peace? There was no convincing answer.”
― Ill Fares the Land
― Ill Fares the Land
“The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Hubert’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Hubert’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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