General

Re: Interesting quotes

William — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 06:37:07 GMT

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can be plain weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple awesomely simple, that's creativity.

- Charles Mingus

Re: Interesting quotes

Esuric — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 06:04:29 GMT

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel -Robert Frost

The past dictates the future, the present dictates the past. – George Orwell

The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom. –Lord Action

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. – Frédéric Bastiat

The more the planning fails, the more the planner plans. –Ronald Regan

“The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.” – Adam Smith

Re: Interesting quotes

mahall — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 05:57:39 GMT

Obviously, I can't quote anything from Bastiat's writings, as it's uninterrupted brilliance.

I agree! Here is a short one..

"The plans differ; the planners are all alike." -Frederic Bastiat

Re: Interesting quotes

Michael J Green — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 05:43:42 GMT

Good thread; surprised I missed it before. Here are some choice quotes from the 19th century:

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools." - Herbert Spencer

"When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves." - Herbert Spencer

"Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its actions to meet emergencies — unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand — unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements. ...Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world." - Herbert Spencer

"To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue. ... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." - Pierre Proudhon

"In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. If the road between two villages is impassable, the peasant says: -“There should be a law about parish roads.” If a park-keeper takes advantage of the want of spirit in those who follow him with servile observance and insults one of them, the insulted man says: -- “There should be a law to enjoin more politeness upon park-keepers.” If there is stagnation in agriculture or commerce, the husbandman, cattle-breeder, or corn speculator argues, “It is protective legislation that we require.” Down to the old clothesman there is not one who does not demand a law to protect his own little trade. If the employer lowers wages or increases the hours of labour, the politician in embryo exclaims, “We must have a law to put all that to rights,” instead of telling the workers that there are other, and much more effectual means of settling these things straight; namely, recovering from the employer the wealth of which he has been despoiling the workmen for generations. In short, a law everywhere and for everything! A law about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put a stop to all the vices and all the evils which result from human indolence and cowardice." - Peter Kropotkin

"If... the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management. justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers. The protectors engage in bitter struggles to wrest customers from one another. In a word, all the abuses inherent in monopoly or in communism crop up." - Gustave de Molinari

Obviously, I can't quote anything from Bastiat's writings, as it's uninterrupted brilliance.

Re: Interesting quotes

Eric080 — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 05:19:14 GMT

Probably the most concise and to the point Thoreau quote though:

If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobediance, 1849

Response: "No! We are a nation of laws, dammit!" - Every non-thinking human on the planet.

Re: Interesting quotes

Eric080 — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 05:16:59 GMT

Off of my Facebook:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." - Henry David Thoreau

"For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the embers can never expire" - Thomas Paine

"The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that -- however bloody -- can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave." - Lysander Spooner
...
"At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world." - Albert Camus

"No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"The state is a gang of thieves writ large." - Murray Rothbard

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Without music, life would be a mistake." - Nietzsche

Re: Interesting quotes

Ricky James Moore II — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 04:04:27 GMT

Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want the government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist.

William Graham Sumner

Re: Interesting quotes

Ricky James Moore II — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 01:31:33 GMT

"It may well be that government was necessary and is still necessary for all the advantages which you attribute to it," says the man who has mastered the Christian theory of life. "I only know that on the one hand, government is no longer necessary for ME, and on the other hand, I can no longer carry out the measures that are necessary to the existence of a government. Settle for yourselves what you need for your life. I cannot prove the need or the harm of governments in general. I know only what I need and do not need, what I can do and what I cannot. I know that I do not need to divide myself off from other nations, and therefore I cannot admit that I belong exclusively to any state or nation, or that I owe allegiance to any government. I know that I do not need all the government institutions organized within the state, and therefore I cannot deprive people who need my labor to give it in the form of taxes to institutions which I do not need, which for all I know may be pernicious. I know that I have no need of the administration or of courts of justice founded upon force, and therefore I can take no part in either. I know that I do not need to attack and slaughter other nations or to defend myself from them with arms, and therefore I can take no part in wars or preparations for wars. It may well be that there are people who cannot help regarding all this as necessary and indispensable. I cannot dispute the question with them, I can only speak for myself; but I can say with absolute certainty that I do not need it, and that I cannot do it. ..."

- Leo Tolstoy, "The Kingdom of God is Within You"

"Doing good to others is not a duty, it is a joy, for it increases our own health and happiness.”
“He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the repetition of ten thousand prayers."

- Zoroaster

"An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger." - Confucius

"All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

- From 'A Man for All Seasons'

"You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning." - Andrew Jackson

"Any man who tried to contend that public education could "work very well" couldn't rationally defend his case in one hundred billion pages." - R.C. Hoiles in a letter to Ludwig von Mises

"I believe totally in a capitalist system, I only wish that someone would try it." - Frank Lloyd Wright

Re: Interesting quotes

Aristippus — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:48:14 GMT

Davy Crockett:

I would rather be beaten and be a man than to be elected and be a little puppy dog. I have always supported measures and principles and not men. I have acted fearless[ly] and independent and I never will regret my course. I would rather be politically buried than to be hypocritically immortalized.

We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.

We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it.

I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law, learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life.

I want people to be able to get what they need to live: enough food, a place to live, and an education for their children. Government does not provide these as well as private charities and businesses.

There ain't no ticks like poly-ticks. Bloodsuckers all.

Re: Interesting quotes

Gero — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:28:58 GMT

Some of the teachers try to refute the accusations of ideological intolerance leveled against their universities and to demonstrate their own impartiality by occasionally inviting a dissenting outsider to address their students. This is mere eyewash. One hour of sound economics against several years of indoctrination of errors! ~ Ludwig von Mises

Re: Interesting quotes

Agamentus — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 17:10:11 GMT

Further reading for the curious - courtesy of the LvMI: http://mises.org/resources/5481/Liberty-Quotations

Re: Interesting quotes

Wesker1982 — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 05:00:05 GMT

A few from my FB

“Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the
leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a
simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a
fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of
the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every
country.” - Hermann Goering, Hitler’s Reich Marshall.

"All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals." - Ron Paul

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”- Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names." Chinese proverb

"In two weeks, the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury, that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties." -Albert Einstein

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

"A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years."- Lysander Spooner

“Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, ‘See, if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’"- Harry Browne

"Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth." - Mahatma Gandhi

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." -Henry David Thoreau

"While men usually recognize criminal acts when they are committed by an individual in the name of his own interest, they often fail to recognize the very same acts for what they are when they are committed by some large gang in the name of "social justice" or the "common good".- Jarret B. Wollstein

"Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?"- Frederic Bastiat

"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?" -Thomas Jefferson

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." - Ayn Rand

"It is true that State apologists maintain that taxation is "really" voluntary; one simple but instructive refutation of this claim is to ponder what would happen if the government were to abolish taxation, and to confine itself to simple requests for voluntary contributions. Does anyone really believe that anything comparable to the current vast revenues of the State would continue to pour into its coffers?"- Murray N. Rothbard

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." - Albert Einstein

"The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence."- Gandhi

"The idea of a strictly limited constitutional State was a noble expiriment that failed, even under the most favorable and propitious circumstances. It failed then, why should a similar expiriment far any better now? No, it is the conservative laissez-fairist, the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, "Limit yoruself"; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian." -Murray Rothbard

People who would ordinarily consider it a great evil to deprive individuals of their rights or oppress politically powerless minority groups will respond with patriotic fervor when these same actions are described as upholding the rule of law."-John Hasnas

"Suppose it be "the best government on earth", does that prove its own goodness, or only the badness of all other governments?"- Lysander Spooner

"Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or even consented to." - Lysander Spooner

Re: Interesting quotes

Agamentus — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 03:41:40 GMT

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
-- Albert Einstein --

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-- Galileo Galilei --

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
-- John Philpot Curran --

Re: Interesting quotes

whakaheke — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 03:02:38 GMT

The efficient man of highest caste makes it his
rule to accept the world as he finds it, and to work
out his own salvation with a light heart. His joy
is in effort, in work, in progress. A difficulty over-
come, a riddle solved, an enemy vanquished, a fact
proved, an error destroyed in such things he
finds the meaning of life and surcease from its
sorrows. But the inefficient man, unable by his
own hand and brain to cope with the conditions
which beset and menace him, seeks refuge, soon or
late, in the notion that the world is out of joint.
Sometimes he concludes, finally, that the horrors of
existence are irremediable, and then he is ripe for
religion, with its promises of repayment in some
gaseous paradise beyond the grave. At other
times he arrives at the idea that all would be well
if there were some abysmal reconstruction of the
scheme of things some new deal of the cards, with
four aces pushed his way. When this madness
falls upon him he gropes about for a ready guide
to the Utopia that arises nebulously in his brain.
And thus it is that discontented, ignorant, helpless
men subscribe to the poetical fancies of imaginative
dreamers...

The great objections to Socialism, as a philoso-
phy, are that it encourages and aggravates the feel-
ing of martyrdom which burns in the breasts of
all such incompetents, and that it inflames them, at
the same time, with the idea that their discomfort
is due, not to the operation of natural laws, which
benefit the world by ridding it automatically and
harshly of the unfit, but to the deliberate and devil-
ish cruelty of their betters. Your true Socialist is
firmly convinced, before everything else, that his
personal existence is of vast and undoubted value
to the world, and that the world, if it were not a
swindling felon, would reward him handsomely
for remaining alive.

~ H.L. Mencken, 'Men versus the Man' pp.119-121

Re: Interesting quotes

Isaac "Izzy" Marmolejo — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 06:27:58 GMT

Common sense is not so common