The ultimate act of power isn't getting what you want, but rather sacrificing it willingly. Because that is an act of power over yourself, of power over power. And what kind of mortal has that?

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. Selfishness is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The pill isn't a treatment for menstrual irregularities, it's a way of refusing to treat them. Doctors are so quick to prescribe the drug to teenagers reporting bad cramps without investigating to see if there is an underlying cause.

—Elizabeth Kissling, quoted in Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender

All the Axial religions, including ancient philosophical schools such as Stoicism and Confucianism, affirm the necessity of regulating desire in order to live in accord with nature—both with our bodies and with the whole of creation. Enlightenment progressivism, in contrast, objectifies nature as a force to be controlled. Control. That is the cornerstone of Sanger's ideology. This is not control over our passions and destructive desires, an ideal Sanger calls "an absurdity". This is control over biology, over nature herself. Sanger's vision of progress is an inversion of ancient wisdom. Rather than curbing our will to live in harmony with nature, we contort nature to unleash our will.

—Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender

When God removes some particular thing from us and it becomes apparent through the event, which is evidence of God's will, that it is not his will that we should have the thing, it is then forbidden as much as sin, since it is God's will that we should not have one any more than the other. The only difference between these two things is that it is certain that God will never will sin, whereas it is not certain that he will never will the other thing. But, while God does not will it, we must regard it as sin, as long as God's will, sole source of good and right, is against it and makes it bad and wrong.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

All inferior men are ready to call the bayonet to their assistance against the arguments of reason, that they may act by means just as mechanical as their own understanding; but superior minds desire nothing but the free exercise of thought, and are aware how much a state of war is unfavorable to it.

—Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

Philosophers speak as they have a mind to, and in the most difficult matters do not scruple to offend religious ears; but we are bound to speak according to a certain rule, lest freedom of speech beget impiety of opinion about the matters themselves of which we speak.

—Augustine, The City of God

In a community in which the ties of family, of caste, of class, and craft fraternities no longer exist people are far too much disposed to think exclusively of their own interests, to become self-seekers practicing a narrow individualism and caring nothing for the public good. Far from trying to counteract such tendencies despotism encourages them, depriving the governed of any sense of solidarity and interdependence; of good-neighborly feelings and a desire to further the welfare of the community at large. It immures them, so to speak, each in his private life and, taking advantage of the tendency they already have to keep apart, it estranges them still more. Their feelings toward each other were already growing cold; Despotism freezes them.

——Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution

The restraints of which men were conscious were but few. Each individual, even among the lowest of the people, felt himself inwardly emancipated from the control of the state and its police, whose title to respect was illegitimate, and itself founded on violence; and no man believed any longer in the justice of the law.

---Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy