When we see that the most ardent advocates of the minimum wage law have been the AFL-CIO, and that the concrete effect of the minimum wage laws has been to cripple the low-wage competition of the marginal workers as against higher-wage workers with union seniority, the true motivation of the agitation for the minimum wage becomes apparent.
A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrusts both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government.
Taylor Caldwell, The Devil’s Advocate (1952).
Leap year began in the year 45 B.C. under Julius Ceasar. This is true. He started the leap year in order to correct the calendar and we still do it to this day. Another thing that happened under Julius Ceasar was, uh, he was such a powerful maniac that all the senators grabbed knives and they stabbed him to death. That would be an interesting thing if we brought that back.
John Mulaney, Saturday Night Live monologue for February 29, 2020.
What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.
Thriller-writer Tom Clancy, Kudlow & Cramer interview (September 2, 2003).
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas in New Dimensions 3, Robert Silverberg, editor.
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo, “Thoughts,” Postscriptum de ma vie, in Victor Hugo’s Intellectual Autobiography, Funk and Wagnalls (1907) as translated by Lorenzo O’Rourke.
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, “Control or Economic Law,” Zeitschrift für Volkswirtshaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung, Volume XXIII (1914): 205–71; John Richard Mez, Ph.D., translator.
The monopolist . . . never has unlimited control; he merely has the choice within the laws of price of different ‘economically possible’ price levels. He can select that price at which the combination of profit for each article, and the number of articles to be sold at that price, are likely to promise the greatest total profit, but he cannot exert his ‘power’ in any other way than in conformity with the laws of price, for it is his behavior that establishes the ‘price law,’ namely the conditions of the amount offered at a given price level, but never can he counteract the laws of price.
Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.
Alexander von Humboldt, Equinoctial Regions of America (1814-1829).
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, “Control or Economic Law,” Zeitschrift für Volkswirtshaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung, Volume XXIII (1914): 205–71; John Richard Mez, Ph.D., translator.
[T]here is one . . . thing that not even the most imposing dictate of power will accomplish: It can never effect anything in contradiction to the economic laws of value, price, and distribution; it must always be in conformity with these; it cannot invalidate them; it can merely confirm and fulfill them.
Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct a struggle against the National Socialist terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.
From the fourth leaflet by “The White Rose,” composed by Christoph Probst (tried & executed by the German Reich on February 22, 1943).