Sublime

With people it’s all a question of what they’re used to, even in the matter of the state and politics. Habit is the prime mover.

Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1945. I’d often give this to my politician friends when I was in politics, and now I give it to students.

In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals — more or less, of course.

Your actions should be determined not by the desire of the people around you, but by the needs of all mankind.

most of the decent rich of the Bright and Cobden sort did have a kind of confused faith that the economic conflict would work well in the long run for everybody.

“Brother, let me ask you one more thing: can it be that any man has the right to decide about the rest of mankind, who is worthy to live and who is more unworthy?”

“And . . . the worst of it was he was so coarse, so dirty, he had the manners of a pothouse; and . . . and even admitting that he knew he had some of the essentials of a gentleman . . . what was there in that to be proud of? Everyone ought to be a gentleman and more than that . . . and all the same (he remembered) he, too, had done little things . 

There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either.