Category: Thought

There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.

“A Conversation with Murray N. Rothbard,” Austrian Economics Newsletter, Volume 11, Number 2 (Summer 1990).

Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local.

Murray N. Rothbard, “Just War” (1970), as reprinted at LewRockwell.com.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.

Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (1973), p. 49.

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

John Adams, in Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: Life of John Adams (1856).

The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.

Simone Weil, Prelude to Politics (1943).

No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.

John Adams, as quoted in Fred R. Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations (2006).

La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir
un cœur d’homme; il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Bertrand Russell, On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism (1914).

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.

John Adams, as quoted in Thomas F. Shubnell, Greatest Jokes of the Century Book 22 (2008).