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The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.

Isabel Paterson

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Isabel Paterson
Age: 74 †
Born: 1886
Born: January 22
Died: 1961
Died: January 10
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Writer
Isabel Mary Bowler
Men
Wish
Wishes
Lives
Puts
Helping
Prime
Others
Admit
Order
Divine
Place
Either
Cannot
Help
Mover
Power
Natural
Humanitarian

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It takes the best part of a lifetime to find out what you don't want.
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The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others.
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Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?
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Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse or omission.
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Freedom is dangerous. Possibly crawling on all fours might be safer than standing upright, but we like the view better up there.
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If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress.
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No law can give power to private persons every law transfers power from private persons to government.
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If there were just one gift you could choose, but nothing barred, what would it be? We wish you then your own wish you name it. Ours is liberty, now and forever.
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A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
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The biggest pests are the people who use altruism as an alibi. What they passionately wish is to make themselves important.
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The craving for power is in itself a sign of inferior abilities and unfitness for responsibility.
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Right now it is a terrible thing to be a rugged individualist but we don't know what else to be except a feeble nonentity.
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Now the sole remedy for the abuse of political power is to limit it but when politics corrupt business, modern reformers invariably demand the enlargement of the political power.
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What kind of world does the humanitarian contemplate as affording him full scope? It could only be a world filled with breadlines and hospitals, in which nobody retained the natural power of a human being to help himself or to resist having things done to him. And that is precisely the world that the humanitarian arranges when he gets his way.
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Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
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An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea.
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Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure.
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The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race.
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The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.
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Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
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