Category: Thought

No matter how far down the wrong road you’ve gone, turn back.

This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.

Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

Thomas Sowell, “The survival of the left,” Forbes (Sept. 8, 1997), collected in The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), p. 144.

We can either have a free Parliament or a free people. Personal freedom requires that all authority is restrained by long-run principles which the opinion of the people approves.

Friedrich A. Hayek, “‘Free Enterprise’ and Competitive Order,” from a paper delivered to the Mont Pelerin Society, April 1947, in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), p. 398.

They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.

Nathaniel Lee (1653–1692) was a playwright known for his blank verse works such as The Rival Queens and Caesar Borgia, and for offending King Charles II in 1681 with Lucius Junius Brutus. This statement is his summary of how he got sent to Bedlam in 1683.

Freedom. Freedom is at the core of universal human values. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom in where to live, and the freedoms to strike, to demonstrate, and to protest, among others, are the forms that freedom takes. Without freedom, China will always remain far from civilized ideals.

Liu Xiaobo, No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems, Chapter 8.

No one should attempt to describe a utopia unless he’s recently reread, for example, the works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Rabelais and Dostoevski to remind himself of how different people are.

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State And Utopia (1974).

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958).

Truth is the enfant terrible of the Virtues.

William John Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905), p. 50.