“An American is quite lost if he tries to think of the dollar as varying. He cannot easily think of anything by which to measure it. Even with our gold standard we have a dollar fluctuating in buying power. Yet we think of the dollar as fixed. It is fixed only in the sense that it is redeemable in a fixed number of grains of gold. It is not fixed in the amount of goods and benefits it can command.”
Irving Fisher, The Money Illusion (1928).
“When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.”
Tom Paine, Common Sense (1776).
In modern days, in civilised days, men’s choice determines nearly all they do. But in early times that choice determined scarcely anything.
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872), p. 29.
“Much as the old world believed in pure blood, it had very little of it. Most historic nations conquered prehistoric nations, and though they massacred many, they did not massacre all. They enslaved the subject men, and they married the subject women. No doubt the whole bond of early society was the bond of descent; no doubt it was essential to the notions of a new nation that it should have had common ancestors; the modern idea that vicinity of habitation is the natural cement of civil union would have been repelled as an impiety if it could have been conceived as an idea.”
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).
“Ideas are forces: the existence of one determines our reception of others.”
G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (Third Series) Problem the First — The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope, and Method, 1879.
“Commerce has brought nations closer, it has given them customs and habits that are almost identical; the heads of states may be enemies: the peoples are compatriots.”
Benjamin Comstant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns (1819).
“What is the Source out of which Taxes are actually paid? The answer is, out of the gains of Exchanges of some sort. Gifts aside, and thefts which are out of the question, no man ever did, no man ever can, pay his taxes, except out of the gains of some sales which he has already made.”
Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy (1891).
“The danger of ancient liberty was that men, exclusively concerned with securing their share of social power, might attach too little value to individual rights and enjoyments.
“The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily.”
Benjamin Comstant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns (1819).
Common sense is outraged by a law which requires a man to part with his property at less than the actual value . . .
Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy (1891).
“An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.”
Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830).