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With Christian Europe tearing itself apart over the Protestant Reformation, the Ottoman Turks saw an opportunity for Europe-wide domination.
The Battle of Vienna took place on September 12th, 1683 (when Charles II was on the English throne). American soldier and politician John Sobieski describes here how his namesake John Sobieski, Grand Marshal and later King of Poland, saved northern Europe from conquest by the Ottoman Turks, an event that undoubtedly changed the course of world history.
RL Stevenson was of the opinion that wrongthink was better than groupthink.
In Crabbed Age and Youth, Robert Louis Stevenson argued that we should not try to silence the opinions of the young, however foolish they may seem. He did not pretend that the young are wise and pioneering thinkers. He thought they were mostly thinking nonsense. But it was better to come up with bad answers to good questions than to ask no questions at all.
George Berkeley warned that industry, not financial speculation, was the guarantee of a nation’s wealth.
In 1721, Bishop Berkeley published an agonised response to the frenzy for get-rich-quick schemes then gripping the country, of which the infamous South Sea Company was just one startling example. The nation’s economy, he said, needed money and credit to cycle steadily through honest industry. Too many people were taking them out and staking them on the wheel of fortune.
Being a free citizen doesn’t mean that everyone else has to get out of your way.
In 1917-18, Arthur Ransome (who would later write Swallows and Amazons) was in St Petersburg, then named Petrograd, reporting on the Communist revolution for the Daily News. One of his tales tickled fellow journalist Alfred Gardiner, who nonetheless drew from it a serious lesson about liberty, a word bandied about as carelessly then as it is today.
Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle explains what it is that defines a tyranny.
We tend to use the word ‘tyrant’ today with a mental picture of some apoplectic dictator raving and stamping. This is hardly adequate, and it allows much tyranny to pass unnoticed. Aristotle gave us a more carefully drawn word-portrait: of a man (or of men) whose goal is to keep a grip on power by systematically dividing, demeaning and disheartening the public.
Richard Cobden called on Parliament to support small, family-owned farms.
In 1864, Richard Cobden MP published an open letter arguing that small-holdings owned by the farmer, with the absolute right of inheritance, were the best guarantee of public morality and national prosperity. He began with the claim of public morality, arguing that the Government’s policy of super-farms was a step back towards feudalism, and a blow to aspiration.
Governments must not use ‘the good of society’ as an excuse to run our lives.
In 1803, William Wilberforce threw his weight behind compuslory vaccination for smallpox, declaring that those who refused it were endangering society. William Cobbett replied with an open letter, in which he wondered whether any Government could resist applying the same logic to every habit, preference or opinion they could label as a social menace.