Category: Thought

Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!

Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did.

Ray Bradbury, in his novel of book-burning, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), p. 54, in which a character explains why society decided to prohibit the creation, reading, and owning of books. N.B. Paper burns at the temperature indicated in the title.

“We can group socialists and protectionists under the name of restrictionists, whilst those who want to base the distribution of wealth solely on free competition can be called liberationists…

“Thus restrictionists are divided into two types: socialists, who through the intervention of the state, wish to change the distribution of wealth in favour of the less rich; and the others, who, even if they are sometimes not completely conscious of what they are doing, favour the rich — these are the supporters of commercial protectionism and social organisation of a military type.”

Vilfredo Pareto, “Socialism and Freedom,” 1891.

It is incumbent upon us to take action if we do not wish to become the subjects of a new Inca empire.

The determining factor in the value of a good, then, is neither the quantity of labor or other goods necessary for its production nor the quantity necessary for its reproduction, but rather the magnitude of importance of those satisfactions with respect to which we are conscious of being dependent on command of the good. This principle of value determination is universally valid, and no exception to it can be found in human economy.

Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871; English translation, 1950), Spring 1977, chapter III, “The Theory of Value.”

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

The monopolist . . . never has unlimited control; he merely has the choice within the laws of price of different “economically possible” price levels. He can select that price at which the combination of profit for each article, and the number of articles to be sold at that price, are likely to promise the greatest total profit, but he cannot exert his “power” in any other way than in conformity with the laws of price, for it is his behavior that establishes the “price law,” namely the conditions of the amount offered at a given price level, but never can he counteract the laws of price.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, “Control or Economic Law,” Zeitschrift für Volkswirtshaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung, Volume XXIII (1914): 205–71; John Richard Mez, Ph.D., translator.

There is a heartfelt and near-universal refusal to understand the basic economic principles behind the creation of wealth.

P. J. O’Rourke, Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (1998), p. 235.

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room.

U.S. President Merkin Muffley, as performed by actor Peter Sellers in the (fictional) black comedy Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964), a film directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George, based on the book Red Alert by Peter George, first published in the UK in 1958 as Two Hours to Doom under the pseudonym Peter Bryant.

The moral law was not written for men alone in their individual character, but it was written as well for nations, and for nations great as this of which we are citizens. If nations reject and deride that moral law, there is a penalty which will inevitably follow. It may not come at once, it may not come in our lifetime; but, rely upon it, the great Italian is not a poet only, but a prophet, when he says: ‘The sword of heaven is not in haste to smite, Nor yet doth linger.’

John Bright, from a speech in Birmingham (October 29, 1858), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 275.

Freedom means self-fulfillment. It also means putting up with others’ irritating pursuit of the same. It means being confronted with disturbing images and ideas.