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Where execution is dominant, as it is in the individual events of a war whether great or small, then intellectual factors are reduced to a minimum.

 

Carl von Clausewitz

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In exceptional cases, like Puerto Rico and Israel, where capital and skills are available, rapid modernization is not incompatible with a considerable measure of individual freedom.
To some extent, the present dominant role of the intellectual in the modernization of backward countries also militates against the prevalence of individual freedom. Not only does the intellectual's penchant for tutoring, directing, and regulating promote a regimented social pattern, but his craving for the momentous is bound to foster an austere seriousness inhospitable to the full play of freedom. The intellectual "transforms the prosaic achievements of society into Promethean tasks, glorious defeats, tragic epics." The strained atmosphere of an eternal drama working up toward a climax and a crisis is optimal for heroes and saints but not for the autonomous individual shaping his life to the best of his ability. The chances are that should an advanced country come into the keeping of the intellectual it would begin to show many of the hectic traits which seem to us characteristic of a backward country in the throes of awakening.

 

Eric Hoffer

 

In many different fields, empirical phenomena appear to obey a certain general law, which can be called the Law of Large Numbers. This law states that the ratios of numbers derived from the observation of a very large number of similar events remain practically constant, provided that these events are governed partly by constant factors and partly by variable factors whose variations are irregular and do not cause a systematic change in a definite direction.

 

Simeon Denis Poisson

 

Social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual. The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility ; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.

 

William Henry Beveridge

 

It is just so with personal liberty. The unlimited freedom which the individual property-owner has enjoyed has been of use to this country in many ways, and we can continue our prosperous economic career only by retaining an economic organization which will offer to the men of the stamp of the great captains of industry the opportunity and inducement to earn distinction. Nevertheless, we as Americans must now face the fact that this great freedom which the individual property-owner has enjoyed in the past has produced evils which were’ inevitable from its unrestrained exercise. It is this very freedom - this absence of State ‘and National restraint - that has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. Any feeling of special hatred toward these men is as absurd as any feeling of special regard. Some of them have gained their power by cheating and swindling, just as some very small business men cheat and swindle; but, as a whole, big men are no better and no worse than their small competitors, from a moral standpoint. Where they do wrong it is even more important to punish them than to punish as small man who does wrong, because their position makes it especially wicked for them to yield to temptation; but the prime need is to change the conditions which enable them to accumulate a power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise, and to make this change not only, without vindictiveness, without doing injustice to individuals, but also in a cautious and temperate spirit, testing our theories by actual practice, so that our legislation may represent the minimum of restrictions upon the individual initiative of the exceptional man which is compatible with obtaining the maximum of welfare for the average man.

 

Theodore Roosevelt

 

The best product should be bought, the best man should be rewarded more. Interfering factors which befuddle this triumph of virtue, justice, truth, and efficiency, etc., should be kept to an absolute minimum or should approach zero as a limit.

 

Abraham Maslow