Category: Thought

“The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Chapter 6, “Planning and the Rule of Law”

“Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand.”

F. A. Hayek, “Scientism and The Study of Society” (1944), p. 67; later published in The Counter-revolution of Science

“All economic activity is carried out through time. Every individual economic process occupies a certain time, and all linkages between economic processes necessarily involve longer or shorter periods of time.”

F. A. Hayek, “Intertemporal Price Equilibrium and Movement in the Value of Money” (1928)

“Never read any book that is not a year old.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “First Visit to England” in English Traits (1856)

“The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “First Visit to England” in English Traits (1856)

“In contemplating the religious system of the Aztecs, one is struck with its apparent incongruity, as if some portion of it had emanated from a comparatively refined people, open to gentle influences, while the rest breathes a spirit of unmitigated ferocity.”

William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, chapter three

“All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’”

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

“The civil state regarded purely as a lawful state, is based on the following a priori principles:

• The freedom of every member of society as a human being.
• The equality of each with all the others as a subject.
• The independence of each member of a commonwealth as a citizen.

“These principles are not so much laws given by an already established state, as laws by which a state can alone be established in accordance with pure rational principles of external human right. ”

Immanuel Kant, Theory and Practice (1791)

Whereas the governments of some low-income countries are improving their economics policies, in the United States the proliferation of political movements that view economics with disdain, along with apparent general public support for government market interventions, are in considerable measure contributing to the decline in the performance of the U.S. economy.

Theodore W. Schultz, Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (1981), p. 143-4.

[T]here is an abundance of rhetoric consisting of dire predictions that the soils of the earth are being depleted, natural resources are being exhausted, the land that is suitable for crops cannot produce enough food for the still growing population, and that massive famines will soon occur. These predictions are not a true reckoning of the limits of the earth, because the future productivity of the economy is not foreordained by space, energy, and cropland. It will be determined by the abilities of human beings. It has been so in the past and there are no compelling reasons why it will not be so in the years to come.

Theodore W. Schultz, Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (1981), p. 140.