Albert Jay Nock quotes - page 3

Culture is knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world; in other words, culture means reading, not idle and casual reading, but reading that is controlled and directed by a definite purpose. (Albert Jay Nock)
According to my observations, mankind are among the most easily tamable and domesticable of all creatures in the animal world. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
Hurt no man, and the second, Then do as you please. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
The Lord replied that he need not worry about that, for even without him the True Faith could probably manage to squeeze along somehow if it had to; """"and as for your figures on the Remnant,"""" He said, """"I don't mind telling you that there are seven thousand of them back there in Israel whom it seems you have not heard of, but you may take My word for it that there they are."""" View quote
Albert Jay Nock
Get up in one of our industrial centres today and say that two and two make four, and if there is any financial interest concerned in maintaining that two and two make five, the police will bash your head in. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favour, and answerable only to his august Boss. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
Reading implies a use of the reflective faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the anthropoid stage, let alone possessing it at a stage of development which makes reading practicable. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
Bad as euphemism is, however, indirection is worse. (Albert Jay Nock)
Conservatism is not a body of opinion, it has no set platform or creed, and hence, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a hundred-per-cent conservative group or party. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
In any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
Likewise, also, when occasion required that I should label myself with reference to particular social theories or doctrines, the same decent respect for accuracy led me to describe myself as an anarchist, an individualist, and a single-taxer. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
I could see how "democracy" might do very well in a society of saints and sages led by an Alfred or an Antoninus Pius. Short of that, I was unable to see how it could come to anything but an ochlocracy of mass-men led by a sagacious knave. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
A prophet of the Remnant will not grow purse-proud on the financial returns from his work, nor is it likely that he will get any great renown out of it. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
As far back as one can follow the run of civilization, it presents two fundamentally different types of political organization. This difference is not one of degree, but of kind. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
They accepted the fact that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience which nature has opened to some and closed to others. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
Twenty, or ten, or even three years ago, no one in his right mind would have dreamed of tagging me with that designation. Why then, at this particular juncture, should it occur to a presumably well-informed person to call me a conservative, when my whole philosophy of life is openly and notoriously the same that it has been for twenty-five years? View quote
Albert Jay Nock
It may now be easily seen how great the difference is between the institution of government, as understood by Paine and the Declaration of Independence, and the institution of the State. ... The nature and intention of government ... are social. Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. (Albert Jay Nock)
The Remnant, on the other hand, want only the best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied; you have nothing more to worry about. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
I have always been singularly free of envy, jealousy, covetousness; I but vaguely understand them. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
So far are they from displaying any overweening love of freedom that they show a singular contentment with a condition of servitorship, often showing a curious canine pride in it, and again often simply unaware that they are existing in that condition. View quote
Albert Jay Nock
It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class - that is, for a criminal purpose. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. View quote
Albert Jay Nock