Category: Thought

He that hath a trade, hath an estate.

Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack (1772).

All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.

James A. Garfield, 20th president of the United States, as quoted in Many Thoughts of Many Minds: A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age (1896), edited by Louis Klopsch, p. 116.

Rien n’est si ordinaire que d’imiter ses ennemis, et d’employer leurs armes.

Nothing is so common as to imitate one’s enemies, and to use their weapons.

Voltaire, “Oracles” in Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1770).

I always find that when you don’t speak to the press, you always get a bad story. When you do speak to the press, you have a shot at getting a good story.

President Donald John Trump, at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on July 24, 2026.

There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty. Fanaticism is excessive zeal. There may be, and have been fanatics in false religion — in the bloody religions of the heathen. There are fanatics in superstition. But there can be no fanatic, however warm their zeal, in the true religion, even although you sell your goods and bestow your money on the poor, and go on and follow your heart your Master. There may, and every hour shows around me, fanatics in the cause of false liberty – that infamous liberty which justifies human bondage, that liberty whose ‘corner-stone is slavery.’ But there can be no fanaticism however high the enthusiasm, in the cause of rational, universal liberty – the liberty of the Declaration of Independence.

Representative Thaddeus Stevens (R.-Penn.), “The California Question” (June 10, 1850), as quoted in The Selected Works of Thaddeus Stevens.

It is scarcely two hundred years since the progress of civilization, of industry, of commerce, that of the social order, and perhaps also the increase of specie, have given to governments the facility of making loans; and in this short space of time these dangerous expedients have led them all either to total or partial bankruptcies, sometimes repeated, or to the equally shameful and more grevious resource of paper money, or to remain overburdened under the weight of a load which daily becomes more insupportable.

But I go farther. I maintain that the evil is not in the abuse; but in the use itself of loans, that is to say that the abuse and the use are one and the same thing; and that every time a government borrows it takes a step towards its ruin. The reason of this is simple: A loan may be a good operation for an industrious man, whose consumption reproduces with profit. By means of the sums which he borrows, he augments this productive consumption; and with it his profits. But a government which is a consumer of the class of those whose consumption is sterile and destructive, dissipates what it borrows, it is so much lost for ever; and it remains burdened with a debt, which is so much taken from its future means.

The Count Destutt de Tracy, in the penultimate chapter to A Treatise on Political Economy (1817), Thomas Jefferson, trans. ed., pp. 243-244.

The greatest escape in human history is the escape from poverty and death

Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013), p. 23.

We clearly see certain animals execute labours which concur to a common end, and which to a certain point appear to have been concerted; or fight for the possession of what they desire, or supplicate to obtain it; but nothing announces that they really make formal exchanges. The reason, I think, is that they have not a language sufficiently developed to enable them to make express conventions; and this, I think, proceeds . . . from their being incapable of sufficiently decomposing their ideas, to generalise, to abstract, and to express them separately in detail, and in the form of a proposition; whence it happens that those of which they are susceptible, are all particular, confused with the attributes, and manifest themselves in mass by interjections, which can explain nothing explicitly. Man, on the contrary, who has the intellectual means which are wanting to them is naturally led to avail himself of them, to make conventions with his fellow beings. They make no exchanges, and he does.

Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, in A Treatise on Political Economy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Mulligan, publisher; W. A. Rind & Co., printer, 1817) Thomas Jefferson, ed. of translation, from the section entitled “The First Part of the Treatise on the Will and Its Effects: Of Our Actions,” chapter one, “Of Society.”

Inequality is often a consequence of progress. Not everyone gets rich at the same time, and not everyone gets access to the latest life-saving measures, whether access to clean water, to vaccines, or to new drugs preventing heart disease. Inequalities in turn affect progress. . . .

Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013), first page of the Introduction.

[W]ith respect to economy . . . [u]nder this relation society consists only in a continual succession of E X C H A N G E S, and exchange is a transaction of such a nature that both contracting parties both gain by it. . . .

We cannot cast our eyes on a civilized country without seeing with astonishment how much this continual succession of small advantages, unperceived but incessantly repeated, adds to the primitive power of man.

It is because this succession of changes, which constitutes society, has three remarkable properties. It produces concurrence of force, increase and preservation of intelligence and division of labour.

The utility of these three effects is continually augmenting.

Destutt de Tracy, Traité de la volonté, English translation titled A Treatise on Political Economy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan; W. A. Rind & Co. Printers, 1817), pp. xvi-xvii.