Category: Thought

[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.

M. Destutt 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.

Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, p. 1.

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.

Philosopher Robert Nozick explaining why freedom cannot be maintained in a statist society, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974).

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?

Philosopher Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), first sentence.

We’re not earning any money by ‘saving.’ The government is manipulating the economy for nobody’s good but its own. Republicans and Democrats both do this; probably Democrats do it for worse purposes than Republicans.
But it’s about time that we all learned what’s going on. Call it a lesson in economic reality.

The artist may doubt his own work, but he is bitterly disappointed if other people doubt it also.

There cannot, I conceive, be any question that to the assumption of a Law Natural we owe the doctrine of the fundamental equality of human beings. That ‘all men are equal’ is one of a large number of legal propositions which, in progress of time, have become political.