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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.

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
Biggest
Wish
Use
Important
Make
Alibi
People
Pests
Altruism
Passionately

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A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
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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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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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It takes the best part of a lifetime to find out what you don't want.
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An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea.
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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.
Isabel Paterson
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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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There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.
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No law can give power to private persons every law transfers power from private persons to government.
Isabel Paterson
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The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.
Isabel Paterson
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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.
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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.
Isabel Paterson
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Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse or omission.
Isabel Paterson
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The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race.
Isabel Paterson
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The craving for power is in itself a sign of inferior abilities and unfitness for responsibility.
Isabel Paterson
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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.
Isabel Paterson
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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.
Isabel Paterson
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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.
Isabel Paterson
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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?
Isabel Paterson
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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.
Isabel Paterson