Ludwig Von Mises Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe One should not search for anything behind the phenomena. They themselves are the message. +
Friedrich A. Hayek planning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition but not by planning against competition. +
Aldous Huxley The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats. +
Adam Smith All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. +
Jean-Paul Sartre the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth +
George Orwell War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. +
Seneca The duty of a man is to be useful to his fellow-men; if possible, to be useful to many of them; failing this, to be useful to a few; failing this, to be useful to his neighbours, and, failing them, to himself: for when he helps others, he advances the general interests of mankind. Just as he who makes himself a worse man does harm not only to himself but to all those to whom he might have done good if he had made himself a better one, so he who deserves well of himself does good to others by the very fact that he is preparing what will be of service to them. +
Norman Bethune Medicine, as we are practicing it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels... Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism... Let us say to the people not, 'How much have you got, but how best can we serve you? +
Mark Twain Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. +
Arthur Schopenhauer The middle ages showed us the results of thinking without experimentation, our present century shows us what experimentation without thinking leads to. +
Ralph Waldo Emerson The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs. +
John Dewey Truth, in final analysis, is the statement of things “as they are,” not as they are in the inane and desolate void of isolation from human concern, but as they are in a shared and progressive experience….Truth, truthfulness, transparent and brave publicity of intercourse, are the source and the reward of friendship. Truth is having things in common. +
Juvenal Who will Guard the Guardians, or Who watches the watchers. +
Marlene Dietrich I do not think we have a "right" to happiness. If happiness happens, say thanks. +
Plato One which is the next best, and has the advantage of compelling the citizens to look to their characters:—Let there be a general rule that every one shall enter into voluntary contracts at his own risk, and there will be less of this scandalous money-making, and the evils of which we were speaking will be greatly lessened in the State. Yes, they will be greatly lessened. At present the governors, induced by the motives which I have named, treat their subjects badly; while they and their adherents, especially the young men of the governing class, are habituated to lead a life of luxury and idleness both of body and mind; they do nothing, and are incapable of resisting either pleasure or pain. Very true. They themselves care only for making money, and are as indifferent as the pauper to the cultivation of virtue. Yes, +
Friedrich Nietzsche Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies. +
Kurt Vonnegut How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive. +
Confucious Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. +
Thomas Jefferson Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another? +
Marshall McLuhan A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. +
Adam Smith The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine +
Albert Einstein Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either +
Jean-Paul Sartre Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk. +
H.L. Mencken Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. +
Ronald Reagan Jefferson repeatedly said that the best government was the smallest government, that “governments are not the masters of the people, but the servants of the people governed. +
Tacitus There was more courage in bearing trouble than in escaping from it; the brave and the energetic cling to hope, even in spite of fortune; the cowardly and the indolent are hurried by their fears +
Cicero Kindness is stronger than fear. +
John Stuart Mill The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. +
Hegel Man is an animal, but even in his animal functions, he is not confined to the implicit, as the animal is; he becomes conscious of them, recognizes them, and lifts them, as, for instance, the process of digestion, into self-conscious science. In this way man breaks the barrier of his implicit and immediate character, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself as spirit. +
Montesquieu Those Greek statesmen who lived under democratic government knew of no support for it other than virtue. Today, statesmen can tell us only of manufacturing, finances, wealth, and even luxury. +
John Maynard Keynes Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. +
Golda Meir Don't be so humble - you are not that great. +
Abraham Lincoln Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends? +
Abraham Lincoln When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion. +
Friedrich August von Hayek The chief difference [between totalitarian and free countries] is that only the totalitarians appear clearly to know how they want to achieve that result, while the free world has only its past achievements to show, being by its very nature unable to offer any detailed "plan" for further growth. +
Sophocles Of evils current upon earth The worst is money. Money 'tis that sacks Cities, and drives men forth from hearth and home; Warps and seduces native innocence, And breeds a habit of dishonesty. +
William Cullen Bryant Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil. +
Fulton J. Sheen Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked. +
Oliver Wendell Holmes The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size. +
Samuel Johnson But the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe It is much easier to recognise error than to find truth; for error lies on the surface and may be overcome; but truth lies in the depths, and to search for it is not given to every one. +
John F. Kennedy The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet. +
Adam Smith It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; +
John Maynard Keynes By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Few people are capable of concerning themselves with the most recent past. Either the present holds us violently captive, or we lose ourselves in the distant past and strive with might and main to recall and restore what is irrevocably lost. +
Socrates Are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul? +
Lao Tzu The wise man is one who, knows, what he does not know. +
John Locke In transgressing the law of nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity +
Adam Smith Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. +