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), p. 424.
Illustration is a detail from a caricature by artist André Gill (1840-1885).
Francis Amasa Walker, defining the subject of his Money, Trade and Industry (1889), first page.
That is money; all that is money; only that is money, which performs a certain office. To parody a familiar proverb: Money is that Money does.
What is heterodox for the wider culture may be orthodox for the intelligentsia.
George Orwell, unfinished review of Evelyn Waugh, in Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living: 1949–1950 (2001), as quoted by David Ramsay Steele, Orwell Your Orwell: A Worldview on the Slab (2017), p. 56.
Francis Amasa Walker, Political Economy (third edition, revised and enlarged, 1888), pp. 507-508.
There is not and there never can be any positive virtue in restraint.
Modern fashions of thinking have done a deadly hurt to the happiness of our race by their insistence upon the helplessness of the mind and the will.
John Cowper Powys, A Philosophy of Solitude (1933), p. 122
The representative system is nothing but an organization by means of which a nation charges a few individuals to do what it cannot or does not wish to do herself. Poor men look after their own business; rich men hire stewards. This is the history of ancient and modern nations. The representative system is a proxy given to a certain number of men by the mass of the people who wish their interests to be defended and who nevertheless do not have the time to defend them themselves.
But, unless they are idiots, rich men who employ stewards keep a close watch on whether these stewards are doing their duty, lest they should prove negligent, corruptible, or incapable; and, in order to judge the management of these proxies, the landowners, if they are prudent, keep themselves well informed about affairs, the management of which they entrust to them. Similarly, the people who, in order to enjoy the liberty that suits them, resort to the representative system, must exercise an active and constant surveillance over their representatives, and reserve for themselves, at times that should not be separated by too lengthy intervals, the right to discard them if they betray their trust, and to revoke the powers they might have abused.
Benjamin Constant, On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns (“De la Liberté des Anciens Comparée à celle des Modernes,”1819)
Once liberated from ambition, a person has nothing to lose by being taken for a fool.
John Cowper Powys, A Philosophy of Solitude (1933), p. 57
The proper study of mankind is books.
Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (1921), Ch. XXVIII.
Individual liberty . . . is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable. But to ask the peoples of our day to sacrifice, like those of the past, the whole of their individual liberty to political liberty, is the surest means of detaching them from the former and, once this result has been achieved, it would be only too easy to deprive them of the latter.
Benjamin Constant, On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns (“De la Liberté des Anciens Comparée à celle des Modernes,”1819)
“Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), chapter one, p. 14.