Status Updates From The Practical Cogitator: Th...

“A tale is told of a man in Paris during the upheaval in the 1848, who saw a friend marching after a crowd toward the barricades. Warning him that these could not be held against the troops, that he had better keep away, and asking why he followed those people, he received the reply, 'I must follow them. I am their leader.'”

A. Lawrence Lowell

The motive of success is not enough. It produces a shortsighted world which destroys the sources of its own prosperity. (...) The robber barons did not conduce to the prosperity of Europe in the Middle Ages, though some of them died prosperously in their beds. Their example is a warning to our civilisation.

- A. N. Whitehead

Wonderful passage by A. Lawrence Lowell, on the Laissez-Faire attitude that was held by many at the beginning of the industrialisation age—leading to child labour abuse and terrible work conditions, where still many protested any regulations(!). It does remind me of modern US Republicans nowadays. Though I’m not of either party.*

“Many men have light enough to be visionary, but not to see.”

And happy events abroad have taught us two simple truths about liberty of democratic people.
The first truth is that Liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of a private power where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, group or any other controlling private power.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt