The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry.I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place, because, such as it is, it is better than nothing.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Letter to William Lloyd Garrison (1853).
An “old woman with too many teeth” in Gene Wolfe’s novel The Knight (2004), p. 22.
Some gain there must be, so this I decree: each time you gain your heart’s desire, your heart will reach for something higher.
Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.
Letter (February 10, 1804).
Nature having made men unequal, by giving stronger bodily and mental powers to one than to another, the end of government ought to be, to destroy this inequality by protecting the weak. Instead of which, it has always leaned to the opposite side, wearing itself out by disregarding the first principle of its organization.
What is called the Progress of Civilization has been marked and conditioned at every step by an extension of the opportunities, a greater facility in the use of the means, a more eager searching for proper expedients, and a higher certainty in the securing of the returns, of mutual exchanges among men.
The effect of a protective duty on any commodity is to raise the price, not only of the amount imported, but of the whole quantity sold in the country; it is a private tax placed upon consumers for the benefit of producers.
Yves Guyot (September 6, 1843 – February 22, 1928) was a French politician and economist.
The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).
Man experiences a multitude of needs, on whose satisfaction his happiness depends, and whose non-satisfaction entails suffering. Alone and isolated, he could only provide in an incomplete, insufficient manner for these incessant needs. The instinct of sociability brings him together with similar persons, and drives him into communication with them. Therefore, impelled by the self-interest of the individuals thus brought together, a certain division of labor is established, necessarily followed by exchanges. In brief, we see an organization emerge, by means of which man can more completely satisfy his needs than he could living in isolation. This natural organization is called society.
Gustave de Molinari, “The Production of Security” (1849; J. Huston McCulloch, trans., 1977).
The object of society is therefore the most complete satisfaction of man’s needs. The division of labor and exchange are the means by which this is accomplished.
This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.
On German fascism, in “An Appeal to Reason” [“Deutsche Ansprache. Ein Appell an die Vernunft”] in Berliner Tageblatt (18 October 1930); as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter in Order of the Day, Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (1942), p. 57
It is no longer profitable, with few exceptions, to ask people what they think, for you will be told what they wish, instead.
Zora Neal Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), p. 257, as quoted by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek.