Category: Thought

Industrial progress . . . tends to displace physical by mechanical power in every branch of productive industry; in other words, it increases the proportion of the material to that of the personal factor. A given quantity of products or services is produced at the cost of less labour, and the quality of the product is also improved. A thousand railwaymen, engineers, mechanics, stokers, &c., transport with ease more material than a million porters could move; or a thousand spinners and weavers by mechanical process manufacture stuffs which an incomparably larger number of handworkers could not produce in a lifetime. It is even no dream to prophesy that science will one day so perfect our knowledge of agriculture that a hundred thousand men—ploughmen, reapers, sowers, &c. — will harvest a quantity of corn which a million labourers could not so much as sow.

Gustave de Molinari, The Society of To-morrow: A Forecast of Its Political and Economic Organisation (1899; 1904), II.12.9.

Why do we unthinkingly assume that political monopolies are a good thing, while we are rightly suspicious of all other sorts of monopoly?

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century (Regnery, 2010), p. 115.

Citizens of constitutional States have obtained a right of consent to public expenditure, and to the taxes which furnish it, but the right has proved sterile. Their representatives have never checked the progressive rise in taxation and expenditure which has occurred in every State, those advances — as may be proved beyond any dispute — having been no less, but often much more rapid, in the States which do possess constitutions. And this process must continue indefinitely for just so long as governments, charged with guaranteeing national security, maintain their right of unlimited requisition upon the life, liberty, and property of the individual.

Gustave de Molinari, The Society of To-morrow: A Forecast of Its Political and Economic Organisation (1899; 1904), II.7.6.

[I]f we are to make sense of American history, the Constitution, and the options before us as we confront Jefferson’s nightmare — namely, a government that acknowledges no fixed limits to its power — we have an obligation to understand it.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century (Regnery, 2010), p. 113.

A community of interests and needs is the foundation of human friendship, while the opposition of needs and interests is not only capable of provoking antipathy, but it is notorious that nothing on earth has the same power of moving a man to violent and implacable hatred as a member of his own species.

Gustave de Molinari, The Society of To-morrow: A Forecast of Its Political and Economic Organisation (1899-1904), I.1.1.

Two resolute men, acting in concord, may transform an Empire, but an ordinary resourceful duck can escape from a dissentient rabble.

Ernest Bramah, as quoted by Lin Carter, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, introduction (Ballantine Books, 1974).

’Tis vain to look for birds in last year’s nests.

Don Quixote in Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote (1605).

The science of mine and thine — the science of justice — is the science of all human rights; of all a man’s rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Lysander Spooner, Natural Law; or, The Science of Justice, Section I, page 5 (1882).

However deep you dig a well it affords no refuge in the time of flood.

Ernest Bramah, “The Story of Tong So, the Averter of Calamities,” Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928)

Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.

Stendhal, journal entry (December 10, 1801)