Category: Thought

The art of paradox can be learned in five minutes, and practised by any child; it consists chiefly in taking two expressions of opinion from different authors, halving them, and uniting the first half of the one with the second half of the other. The result is invariably startling, and generally incomprehensible. When a young society critic knows how to be startling and incomprehensible, his reputation is soon made, for people readily believe that what they cannot understand is profound, and anything which astonishes is agreeable to a taste deadened by a surfeit of spices.

F. Marion Crawford, Saracinesca (1887).

Dr. Smith and all of his sensible disciples have believed that people would not strive to do anything well unless there were a reasonable measure of agreement between the success of their efforts and the rewards they would receive.

George J. Stigler, “The Effect of Government on Economic Efficiency,” Business Economics (1988): pp. 7-13.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy (1919).

The essence of scientific progress is to edge up this ladder from ignorance to knowledge, and it is complicated by the fact that the ladder keeps getting longer!

George J. Stigler, first chapter to the fourth edition of The Theory of Price (1987).

The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship.

Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912).

A famous theorem in economics states that a competitive enterprise economy will produce the largest possible income from a given stock of resources. No real economy meets the exact conditions of the theorem, and all real economies will fall short of the ideal economy — a difference called “market failure.” In my view, however, the degree of “market failure” for the American economy is much smaller than the “political failure” arising from the imperfections of economic policies found in real political systems. The merits of laissez-faire rest less on its famous theoretical foundations than on its advantages over the actual performance of rival forms of economic organization.

George J. Stigler, entry on Monopoly in Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Winston Churchill, speech, House of Commons, November 11, 1947, can be found in Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James, vol. 7, p. 7566 (1974).

I do not conceal my lack of admiration for a painfully long list of redistributive measures undertaken by modern governments. Many serve no ethically accepted purpose such as compassion for the needy; indeed, they serve only as recognition of which groups possess or lack political influence.

George Stigler, “The Effect of Government on Economic Efficiency,” Business Economics
 (1988): 7-13.

Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962).

No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honour, it has no word to keep.

Carl Gustav Jung, interview with H. R. Knickerbocker (1939), quoted in A Life of Jung (2002) by Ronald Hayman, p. 360.