Frank J. DiStefano Quotes

Human society is made up of partialities. Each citizen has an interest and a view of his own, which, if followed out to the extreme, would leave no room for any other citizen.

No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.

And where the rewards for merit are greatest, there are found the best citizens.

In a republic the first rule for the guidance of the citizen is obedience of the law.

Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts—and that is a very good thing.

When one of a culture's guiding credos is that "all men are created equal," any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance.

Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.

Male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honors, positions, and public employment according to their capacity and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents.

The future belongs to the competent. It belongs to those who are very, very good at what they do. It does not belong to the well meaning.

the qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. they are the result of habit and long training.

Every private in the French army carries a Field Marshall wand in his knapsack.

If a man can make typewriters better than anyone else, let us, in the name of common sense, keep him on the job of making typewriters.

Votes are something that you earn.

The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.

Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

A government can be no better than the public opinion which sustains it.

Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use.

I think we are a better and a more efficient society when people actually get to do the things that they really are passionate about, and really are amazing at, because it's going to mean better stuff for us, too.

America has but one main problem -- the character of the men and women it shall produce.

We are a democratic - we are living in democracy.

...Fatherland without freedom and merit is a large word with little meaning.

A complex society is not necessarily more advanced than a simple one; it has just adapted to conditions in a more complicated way.

Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It takes more to make one sage today than it did to make the seven of Greece. And you need more resources to deal with a single person these days than with an entire nation in times past.