It is wasteful for the government to commandeer resources from the private sector during good times, and it’s even more harmful when the government kicks the economy during a recession.
Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., Contra Krugman: Smashing the Errors of America’s Most Famous Keynesian (2018), p. 18.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-1783), Query XVII, p. 169.
What people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise.
Barbara Jordan, Commencement Address, Harvard University (June 16, 1977), as cited in Let me tell you what I’ve learned: Texas Wisewomen Speak, PJ Pierce, University of Texas Press (2010), p. 16.
Francis Amasa Walker, Money in Its Relation to Trade and Industry (1889).
Paying debts is always a disagreeable necessity.
Note the difference between a right and a privilege. A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never. Privilege, in the abstract, does not exist; there is no such thing. Rights recognized, privilege is destroyed.
Voltairine De Cleyre, “The Economic Tendency of Freethought,” in Liberty Vol. XI, #25 (February 15, 1890).
I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.
George Orwell on his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 4 p. 564.
There is no obstacle in the path of young people who are poor or members of minority groups that hard work and preparation cannot cure.
Barbara Jordan, as quoted in Wisdom For the Soul of Black Folk, ed. Larry Chang & Roderick Terry, Gnosophia Publishers (2007), p. 117.
Ideas are forces: the existence of one determines our reception of others.
G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (Third Series) Problem the First — The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope, and Method (1879).
Things are seldom what they seem,
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, opening lines to the famous duet between Buttercup and the Captain in the “Gilbert and Sullivan” operetta H.M.S. Pinafore (1878; Sir Arthur Sullivan, composer).
Skim milk masquerades as cream.
In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by ‘thou shalt not’, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by ‘love’ or ‘reason’, he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.
George Orwell on “the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the Anarchist or pacifist vision of society,” Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 4, p. 252.