Category: Thought

In fact, as a general thing, money-getters are the benefactors of our race.

P. T. Barnum, Art of Money Getting (1880).

The best kind of charity is to help those who are willing to help themselves.

P. T. Barnum, Art of Money Getting (1880).

The utility clearest to all eyes is that residing in material things. Man understands without any effort that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and that it is still more useful when leaving the spit. It is needless to tell you that first the sportsman and then the cook have added a surplus value to the bird. If I put before you a ton of pig-iron worth fifty francs, and then a ton of fine needles, worth ninety thousand, you will instantly see the enormous supplement of utility which the work of men has added to the metal.

But there are other benefits of which the utility is not as directly visible to our eyes, though it be at least as great. An impalpable, invisible, imponderable idea is often more useful than a mountain of benefits clear to the naked eye. Man is a thinking body; his hands have done much to render the earth inhabitable, but his brain has done a hundred times more.

Edmond About, Handbook of Social Economy; or, The Worker’s A B C (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873), pp. 27-28.

Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and ‘fascist,’ while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up.

Jean-François Revel, “Europe’s Anti-American Obsession,” The American Enterprise (December 2003).

Politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business.

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
But who will guard the guardians themselves?

Juvenal, Sixth Satire

The commitment to ‘social justice’ has in fact become the chief outlet for moral emotion, the distinguishing attribute of the good man, and the recognized sign of the possession of a moral conscience. Though people may occasionally be perplexed to say which of its conflicting claims advanced in its name are valid, scarcely anyone doubts that the expression has a definite meaning, describes a high ideal, and points to grave defects of the existing social order which urgently call for correction. Even though until recently one would have vainly sought in the extensive literature for an intelligible definition of the term, there still seems to exist little doubt, either among ordinary people or among the learned, that the expression has a definite and well understood sense.

But the near-universal acceptance of a belief does not prove that it is valid or even meaningful any more than the general belief in witches or ghosts proved the validity of these concepts.

Friedrich A. Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, being the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 66.

No man will get my help in robbery, and therefore no governor will take me on his staff.

Juvenal, Third Satire

[I]t is an ironic and remarkable feature of the American Left that there is no longer space for liberals within American liberalism.

Milo Yiannapoulis, preface to Vox Day, SJW’s Always Lie, 2015.

If an ideology produces unhappiness, misery, grief, division, sickness, boredom, and hatred, surely this is not a commendation but an indictment.

John Norman, GorChronicles.com