John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, Letter to Mandell Creighton (April 5, 1887), published in Essays on Freedom and Power (1972)
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Jorge Luis Borges statement to the Argentine Society of Letters (c.1946)
Both in England and on the Continent a graduated property tax (l’impôt progressif) has been advocated, on the avowed ground that the state should use the instrument of taxation as a means of mitigating the inequalities of wealth. I am as desirous as any one that means should be taken to diminish those inequalities, but not so as to relieve the prodigal at the expense of the prudent. To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbours.
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book V, Chapter II.
For all except the very few of extraordinary gifts, the spur of gain is not only powerful, it is indispensable.
Yves Guyot, stating what he called “the third incentive of human action,” in Where and why Public Ownership Has Failed (H. F. Baker, trans., 1914).
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1895.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1895.
Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 83.
Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.
The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.
La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, (1665, 1678), 61st maxim.
A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.
Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 79
Sincere enthusiasm is the only orator who always persuades. It is like an art the rules of which never fail; the simplest man with enthusiasm persuades better than the most eloquent with none.
La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, (1665, 1678), eighth maxim.