Category: Thought

It is easy for the weak to be gentle… … if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.

We have seen how wealth spreads everywhere when trade enjoys full and permanent freedom. It pours continuously from one province into another. Agriculture is flourishing: people cultivate the arts even in the hamlets: each citizen finds a comfortable existence in work of his choice: all is brought to value; and one does not catch a glimpse of those fortunes out of all proportion which bring luxury and wretchedness.
Everything changes in step with different causes which bring blows to freedom of trade. We have run through these causes, which are wars, tolls, customs, guilds, exclusive privileges, taxes on consumption, variations in coinage, exploitation of mines, every kind of government borrowing, the grain police, the luxury of a great capital, the rivalry of nations, finally the spirit of finance which enters every part of the administration.
Then disorder is at its height. Wretchedness grows with luxury: the towns fill with beggars: the countryside loses population; and the state which has contracted huge debts appears to have no further expedients except those which bring about its ruin.

From the concluding chapter to Commerce and Government considered in their mutual relationship, by the Abbé de Condillac of the Académie Française & Member of the Royal Society of Agriculture of Orléans (1776).

Statesmen are gamesters, and the people are the cards they play with.

David Crockett, first sentence of The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir-apparent to the “Government” and the Appointed Successor to General Andrew Jackson (Tenth edition, 1836).

Now we take the human function to be a certain kind of life, and take this life to be the soul’s activity and actions that express reason, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these. Each function is completed well when its completion expresses the proper virtue. Therefore, the human good turns out to be the soul’s activity that expresses virtue. And if there are more virtues than one, the good will express the best and most complete virtue. Moreover, it will be in a complete life. For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day; nor, similarly, does one day or a short time make us blessed and happy.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Mens sana in corpore sano.

“You should pray for a sound mind in a sound body.”

Elevation of purpose, though a condition of the best achievements, is also a condition of the worst. The maximum of evil is never done save by the agency of men and women of disinterested lives and virtuous intentions.

J. H. Levy, biographical introduction to Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism, (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1894).

Commerce presumes two things: surplus production on the one hand, and on the other consumption to be made.

Commerce and Government considered in their mutual relationship, by the Abbé de Condillac of the Académie Française & Member of the Royal Society of Agriculture of Orléans (1776).