Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1869).
Permanent mass unemployment destroys the moral foundations of the social order. The young people, who, having finished their training for work, are forced to remain idle, are the ferment out of which the most radical political movements are formed. In their ranks the soldiers of the coming revolutions are recruited.
Ludwig Edler von Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus — “Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis” (1922), Part V : The Economics of a Socialist Community, § V : Destructionism, Ch. 33 : The Motive Powers of Destructionism, p. 440.
What we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner, “War,” (1903).
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
George Washington, Letter to Major-General Robert Howe (August 17, 1779), published in The Writings of George Washington: 1778-1779, Worthington Chauncey Ford, editor (1890).
The man who started with the notion that the world owed him a living would once more find, as he does now, that the world pays him its debt in the state prison.
William Graham Sumner, “The Challenge of Facts,” (1914).
The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship.
Ludwig Edler von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912).
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence; true friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
Law did not leap into life as something perfect and complete. For thousands of years it has grown and it is still growing. The age of its maturity — the age of impregnable peace — may never arrive.
The second you attain power, you become what you’ve been fighting against.
Mike Resnick, Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (1986), Chapter 23.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
Rudyard Kipling, from the poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” (1919).
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘Stick to the Devil you know.’