Category: Thought

The truest mark of having been born with great qualities is to have been born without envy.

La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, (1665, 1678), 433rd maxim.

To hurt in any degree the interest of any one order of citizens, for no other purpose but to promote that of some other, is evidently contrary to that justice and equality of treatment which the sovereign owes to all the different orders of his subjects.

Adam Smith, The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)

There is no better means of reducing a fallacious variety of thought to absurdity than to let it live itself out completely.

Attributed to Carl Menger in Ludwig Von Mises, “Comments about the mathematical treatment of economic problems.” Journal of Libertarian Studies, Spring 1977, 1(2), p. 100.

Gratitude is the virtue of wise and generous minds. Ingratitude is the fault of fools and clowns.

La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, (1665, 1678), maxims 688 and 689.

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the People’s Stick.’

Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1873).

The liberty of every individual is only the reflection of his own humanity, or his human right through the conscience of all free men, his brothers and his equals.
I can feel free only in the presence of and in relationship with other men. In the presence of an inferior species of animal I am neither free nor a man, because this animal is incapable of conceiving and consequently recognizing my humanity. I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen.
 Only in respecting their human character do I respect my own.

My public and I understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.

Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that the enemy too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, no. 46 (October 9, 1917).

In arguing against free enterprise capitalism, the collectivist always adopts the false assumption of a fixed number of jobs in that system. Conversely, in arguing for collectivism, he always assumes that there will be as many jobs as there are workers. The government will make the jobs.

Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.

Even in the darkest and crassest times liberty trembles in the lines of poets and affirms itself in the pages of thinkers and burns, solitary and magnificent, in some men who cannot be assimilated by the world around them.

Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, 1938 (1941, Eng. translation).