Thomas Jefferson Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs. +
Lao Tzu When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you. +
Thomas Paine If a house of legislation is to be composed of men of one class, for the purpose of protecting a distinct interest, all the other interests should have the same. The inequality, as well as the burthen of taxation, arises from admitting it in one case, and not in all. Had there been a house of farmers, there had been no game laws; or a house of merchants and manufacturers. the taxes had neither been so unequal nor so excessive. It is from the power of taxation being in the hands of those who can throw so great a part of it from their own shoulders, that it has raged without a check. +
Virgil But you, Roman, must remember that you have to guide the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to graft tradition onto peace, to shew mercy to the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low. +
Arthur Schopenhauer The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice. +
Samuel Taylor Coleridge If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself. +
Montesquieu If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are. +
Friedrich Nietzsche Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed. +
Seneca Reason shows us there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. +
Sophocles Do not believe that you alone can be right. The man who thinks that, The man who maintains that only he has the power To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty. +
Abraham Lincoln Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough. +
Jack Layton My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world. +
Alvin Toffler Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest," he said. "Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone. +
Cicero Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do. +
Seneca In the meantime, cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, not to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases. +
Adam Smith is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. +
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. +
Seneca Let us take pleasure in what we have received and make no comparison; no man will ever be happy if tortured by the greater happiness of another. +
Albert Einstein Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either +
Eleanor Roosevelt America is not a pile of goods, more luxury, more comforts, a better telephone system, a greater number of cars. America is a dream of greater justice and opportunity for the average man and, if we can not obtain it, all our other achievements amount to nothing. +
Friedrich A. Hayek Nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist - and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.” +
William Pitt the Younger Necessity is the plea for every infringement on human rights. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. +
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. +
Dwight D. Eisenhower Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well. +
Montesquieu It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of maturer age are already sunk into corruption. +
Juvenal It is a poor thing to lean upon the fame of others, lest the pillars give way and the house fall down in ruin. +
Clarence Darrow True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else. +
John F. Kennedy To be courageous, these stories make clear, requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all. Politics merely furnishes one arena which imposes special tests of courage. In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follow his conscience - the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men - each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredient - they can teach, they can offer hope, they provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul. +
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. +
George S. Patton Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition. +
John Maynard Keynes The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. +
Kurt Vonnegut Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow. +
Ludwig von Mises He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them. +
William Shakespeare A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. +
Frederick the Great He who defends everything, defends nothing. +
Arthur Schopenhauer Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money. +
Vladimir Lenin America, like a few other nations, has become characteristic for the depth of the abyss that divide a handful of brutal millionaires who are stagnating in a mire of luxury, and millions of laboring starving men and women who are always staring want in the face. +
Arthur Schopenhauer The power of religious dogma, when inculcated early, is such as to stifle conscience, compassion, and finally every feeling of humanity. +
Arthur Schopenhauer The middle ages showed us the results of thinking without experimentation, our present century shows us what experimentation without thinking leads to. +
Frederick S. Perls Don't push the river, it flows by itself. +
Arthur Schopenhauer The ordinary man places his life’s happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed. +
Bias of Priene It is difficult to bear a change of fortune for the worse with magnanimity." +
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 +
John F. Kennedy The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet. +
Søren Kierkegaard People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. +
Ludwig von Mises What is thus improperly regarded as profit, instead of as part of capital, is consumed by the entrepreneur or passed on either to the consumer in the form of price-reductions that would not otherwise have been made or to the labourer in the form of higher wages, and the government proceeds to tax it as income or profits. In any case, consumption of capital results from the fact that monetary depreciation falsifies capital accounting. +
Claude Bernard When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted. +
Plato Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower which may he a fortress to me all my days? For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are unmistakable. But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. +
Virgil Evil is nourished and grows by concealment. +
Thomas Paine Let it then be heard, and let man learn to feel that the true greatness of a nation is founded on principles of humanity, and not on conquest. +