Tushant

“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

“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

“Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“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