Category: Thought

Wolves are not killed because they are gray, but because they eat sheep.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.

[T]he direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but — from what we can judge to-day — of any civilisation.

All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws.

One of the chief objects of medicine is to save us from the natural consequences of our vices and follies. The moment it becomes moral it becomes quackery. A scientific physician should have no opinions about the ethical standards and deserts of his patient.

H. L. Mencken, Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956), p. 7.

We can have exactly as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for.

Thomas Mackay, Methods of Social Reform (London: John Murray, 1896), p. 210.

In this age of communication, ignorance is no longer bliss.

Lawrence Fawcett & Barry J. Greenwood, The UFO Cover-Up: What the Government Won’t Say (1984).

The incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and intellectual power; to elevate this power is the only way to counteract this want; but to do this presupposes the exercise of that power, and this exercise presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action (1792).

[A]re the gains of the privileged company, national gains? Undoubtedly not: for they are wholly taken from the pockets of the nation itself.

Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.