Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 213 of Virginia Postrel’s superb and still-relevant 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies; in this book, Postrel distinguishes between “stasists” and “dynamists”; stasists are so fearful of, or so unhappy with, change that they call upon the state to govern and limit it; dynamists, in contrast, not only do not feel entitled to impose upon others their preferred particular state of the world, they also recognize that human flourishing is possible only when open-ended change is allowed within the rules of private property and contract law:

Tolerance is foremost among the virtues of forbearance – not the tolerance that makes no judgments, but the tolerance that permits peaceful differences. This attitude contrasts sharply with the stasist expectation that no one should be disrupted by other people’s enterprise, that altering the status quo should require permission. A dynamist, too, may prefer his neighborhood just the way it is; he may not like his neighbor’s new house or the temple proposed down the block. But he does not expect to exercise veto power over other people’s improvements or to cancel other people’s dreams.