Category: Thought

“Free Trade! What is it? Why, breaking down the barriers that separate nations; those barriers, behind which nestle the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred, and jealousy, which every now and then burst their bounds, and deluge whole countries with blood; those feelings which nourish the poison of war and conquest, which assert that without conquest we can have no trade, which foster that lust for conquest and dominion which sends forth your warrior chiefs to scatter devastation through other lands, and then calls them back that they may be enthroned securely in your passions, but only to harass and oppress you at home.”

Richard Cobden, Speech at Covent Garden (28 September, 1843).

“Among the ancients, a successful war increased both private and public wealth in slaves, tributes, and lands shared out. For the moderns, even a successful war costs infallibly more than it is worth.”

Benjamin Constant The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, 1819

“A common mistake is that the conclusions of the plain unlettered man differ from those of economists in being more immediately founded on observed facts and less on deduction. The truth is that the plain unlettered man is more prone to rely on deduction from unproved hypotheses than the economist is. All classes must equally use deduction, because it is only by this logical process that we form any conclusion about the future effect of any present cause. Drawing the conclusion that rain will follow a certain direction of the wind with certain appearances of the clouds is an act of logical deduction. The main point in which men’s logical methods differ lies in the care with which hypotheses are formed by induction from observed facts, and the readiness of men to test them. Now it is the plain man who is most prone to form hasty generalizations from insufficient facts, to consider the conclusions which he thence deduces as final, and to be blind to all facts which do not tally with his theory.”

Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy, 1886, p. 40

“The ancients, as Condorcet says, had no notion of individual rights. Men were, so to speak, merely machines, whose gears and cogwheels were regulated by the law. The same subjection characterized the golden centuries of the Roman Republic; the individual was in some way lost in the nation, the citizen in the city.”

Benjamin Constant The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, 1819

“War precedes commerce. War and commerce are only two different means of achieving the same end, that of getting what one wants. Commerce is simply a tribute paid to the strength of the possessor by the aspirant to possession. It is an attempt to conquer, by mutual agreement, what one can no longer hope to obtain through violence. A man who was always the stronger would never conceive the idea of commerce. It is experience, by proving to him that war, that is, the use of his strength against the strength of others, exposes him to a variety of obstacles and defeats, that leads him to resort to commerce, that is, to a milder and surer means of engaging the interest of others to agree to what suits his own. War is all impulse, commerce, calculation. Hence it follows that an age must come in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.”

Benjamin Constant The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, 1819

“Progress is in inverse ratio to the coercive interference of man with man, and in direct ratio to the control by man of external nature.”

“If you try to lessen or restrict competition for your private benefit, you are not denying the truth of an economic law; you are only trying to turn it to your own advantage.”

“The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.”

Leo Tolstoy, What Is To Be Done? (1886) Chap. XXXVIII, as translated in The Novels and Other Works of Lyof N. Tolstoï (1902) edited by Nathan Haskell Dole, p. 259

“It is not the astronomer’s business to consider whether it would be better if the sun were nearer or farther from the earth, or if he turned round her, instead of turning round him. Nor is it the chemist’s business to consider whether carbonic acid and carbonic oxide are noxious gases that ought not to exist. It has never been thought desirable to make Newton responsible for tiles falling on the people’s heads.

“Economists, however, are held answerable for the laws which they discover.”

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.”