Hunt Tooley
Quotation
of the Week Archive
"Historical knowledge is
indispensable for those who want to build a better world."
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Omnipotent Government, 1944
"Imperialism is an atavism."
Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883-1950), 1918
"The Internet is
not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's
a
series of tubes.... And
if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled. And if they
are
filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to
be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of
material, enormous amounts of material.... I just the other
day got - an Internet was sent by
my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it
yesterday."
Senator
Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), in hearings on internet regulation, summer 2006
"Every thing secret degenerates, even
the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how
it can bear discussion and publicity.
John
Dalberg-Acton
(Lord Acton),
1834-1902, in a letter of
23
January 1861
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that
Governments long established should not be changed for light and
transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that
mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than
to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are
accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing
invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under
absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off
such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Declaration of Independence, July 4,
1776
"Few famous statesmen, especially in
countries with absolutistic constitutions, have been motivated by
patriotism to enter the state service; much more often the motives have
been ambition, the wish to command, to be admired, and to become
famous. I must confess that I am not free from this passion."
Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), in a
letter to his father, 1838.
“The state is the great fictitious
entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”
Frederic Bastiat
(1801-1850), Selected Essays, 1848.
"Legislators and revolutionaries who
promise equality and liberty at the same time are either psychopaths or
mountebanks."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), in Maximen und Reflexionen
"The more I see of men, the more I
like dogs."
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël,
1766-1817
"The danger is not that a particular
class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."
John Dalberg-Acton (Lord Acton),
1834-1902, in a letter to Mary Gladstone, 1881
"If the natural tendencies of mankind
are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it
that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the
legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race?
Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than
the rest of mankind?"
Frédéric Bastiat
(1801-1850)
“What, speaking in quite unofficial
language, is the net purport and upshot of war? To my knowledge, for
example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge,
usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain ‘Natural
Enemies’ of the French, there are successively selected during the
French war, say thirty able-bodied men: she has, not without difficulty
and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so
that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can
stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping
and swearing they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away,
at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the
south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot,
in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a
French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending; till at length, after
infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition; and
Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway
the word ‘Fire!’ is given: and they blow the souls out of one another;
and in place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead
carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for."
Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881
"An honest man can feel no pleasure
in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens."
Thomas Jefferson,
1743-1826 (from a letter of
1813)
"It is indeed probable that more
harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to
stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing
evil."
Friedrich von Hayek, 1899-1992
"Warriors and
despots are generally bad economists and they instinctively carry their
ideas of force and violence into the civil politics of their
governments. Free trade is a principle which recognizes the paramount
importance of individual action."
Richard Cobden,
1804-1865
"Among
precautions against ambition, it may
not be
amiss to take one against our own. I must fairly say I dread our own
power and our own ambition. I dread our being too much dreaded....
Sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination
against us which may end in our ruin."
Edmund Burke, Remarks on the Policy of the Allies,
1793