Category: Thought

The entire logic of human existence can be formulated in five words — ‘produce in order to consume.’ Our reason and sense of justice revolt at the notion of a man who should perpetually consume without producing anything. Everybody understands that children should consume on credit: it is right that old persons should end by consuming what they have produced in their prime; it is perfectly proper that the worker should rest when tired, and consume a part of his surplus products. But he among us who should voluntarily live On another’s labour, and share useful things without adding to them, would be a true parasite.

Edmond About, Handbook of Social Economy; or, The Worker’s A B C, (New York: D. Appleton & Co., translated from the final French edition, 1873), p. 61.

How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can’t say and what we can show and what we can’t show — it’s enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Man Who Sold the Moon

As great and strong societies have arisen, as the sphere of warfare has diminished while the sphere of industry has enlarged, the need for absolute conformity has ceased to be felt, while the advantages of freedom and variety come to be ever more clearly apparent. At a late stage of civilization, the flexible or plastic society acquires even a military advantage over the society that is more rigid, as in the struggle between French and English civilization for primacy in the world. In our own country, the political birth of which dates from the triumph of England in that mighty struggle, the element of plasticity in man’s nature is more thoroughly heeded, more fully taken account of, than in any other community known to history; and herein lies the chief potency of our promise for the future.

John Fiske, The Meaning of Infancy, 1883.

Liberty can alone teach nations the industry for which they are fitted, and determine national vocations.

Edmond About, Handbook of Social Economy; or, The Worker’s A B C, (New York: D. Appleton & Co., translated from the final French edition, 1873), p. 155.

There is time enough for a great many things to happen in a thousand centuries.

John Fiske, The Discovery of America, Vol. 1, p. 15.

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, ‘If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?’

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “English Traits” (1856).

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).