When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, “To know one’s self.” And what was easy, “To advise another.”
Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book I: “The Seven Sages.”
You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don’t already believe it.
Robert Anton Wilson, Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (1998).
Think for yourself and question authority.
Timothy Leary’s track on Sound Bites from the Counter Culture (1989).
The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U. S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation — if I may use that biological term — that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Part II, Chapter VII, pg. 83.
Everything in the universe relates to the number 5, one way or another, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter.
Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger) and Kerry Thornley (Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst), Principia Discordia (1965).
The state — the machinery and power of the state — is a potential resource or threat to every industry in the society. With its power to prohibit or compel, to take or give money, the state can and does selectively help or hurt a vast number of industries.
George Stigler, “The theory of economic regulation,” The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science (1971).
The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles.
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book VIII, Chapter 1.
Alles ist einfacher, als man denken kann,
zugleich verschränkter, als zu begreifen ist.
Everything is simpler than one can imagine, at the same time more involved than can be comprehended.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections (1833), Maxim 1209.
In abstract theory, people ought to-day to view the infamy of Heliogabalus with at least the disfavor we reserve for our neighbors’ children: in practise, a knave’s wickedness becomes with time an element of romance, and large iniquities serve as colorful relief to the tedium of history. And it seems banal to point out that it no longer matters ethically, to anyone breathing, that a shoe-maker’s son, rather more than three centuries ago, made ruin of his body through intemperance, for the case is no longer within the jurisdiction of morals.
The fictional author John Charteris in James Branch Cabell’s Beyond Life: Dizaine des Démiurges (1919), Chapter IV, “Which Admires the Economist,” §5.
Whether one is a conservative or a radical, a protectionist or a free trader, a cosmopolitan or a nationalist, a churchman or a heathen, it is useful to know the causes and consequences of economic phenomena.
George Stigler, The Economist as Preacher and Other Essays (1982), p.61.