Tushant

“If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes “culture,” and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western “moral thinkers,” including feminists.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Though freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of civilization, it did not arise from design.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

“Men do not let anyone seize their estates, and if there is the slightest dispute about their boundaries they rush to stones and arms; but they allow others to encroach on their lives – why, they themselves even invite in those who will take over their lives.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“What can be more calamitous than that men should be regarded as enemies and put to death, not for any crime or misdeed, but for being of independent mind?”
― Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise