Category: Thought

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).

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Letter (January 23, 1861), published in Abbot Gasquet, Lord Acton and his Circle (1906), Letter 74.

On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.

We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.

François-Marie Arouet (pen name “Voltaire,” 1694-1778), Letter to M. de Grenonville (1719).

We live in a society of individuals, not a society of equals. We can make little or no progress in analyzing the former as if it were the latter.

James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (1975).

Socialism has its black sheep. What cause has not? But that which fills me with grief is that it has so many white ones. The most miserable circumstance of our time is that much of its devotion and self-denial is running into Socialistic channels. It is this misdirected self-abnegation, characteristic of the Dark Ages, which is carrying us back to them.

Joseph Hiam Levy, introduction to the first English edition (1894) of Yves Guyot’s The Tyranny of Socialism.

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).

Social stability requires agreement on and enforcement of a structure of individual rights, whether these rights be over the disposition of privately partitionable goods, over the usage of common facilities, or over ordinary patterns of interpersonal behavior, and whether the enforcement be externally imposed or internally monitored.

James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (1975).