The last person to trust with power is someone who is dying to have it. The best person to wield power is someone who is reluctant to do so, but who will do it for a while as a civic duty. That is why term limits should make it impossible to have a whole career in politics.
There’s no business that’s too small for government to torture.
It is certain that if people do not understand a true political economy, they will make a false one of their own.
William Stanley Jevons, Political Economy (1878).
You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State.
Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand, praising her novel Atlas Shrugged, in correspondence (January 23, 1958), quoted in Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007).
The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).
Aime la vérité, mais pardonne à l’erreur.
Love truth, but pardon error.
François-Marie Arouet (pen name “Voltaire,” 1694-1778), “Deuxième discours: de la liberté,” Sept Discours en Vers sur l’Homme (1738).