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.

Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it — the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers — felt any responsibility about it, because they were …

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 …

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests — if you try to feed it with a shovel you get bad results.

The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed — we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is …