Topic: Proverb

Quotes

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

• Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning.#
• The present age … has been described as “destitute of faith, but terrified at scepticism”#

Frank Knight, “Intellectual Confusion on Morals and Economics” (1935)

• Practically speaking, to call a situation hopeless is identical with calling it ideal.#

Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines (2014)

• If modern scholars thought more like wily peasants, they would be less resistant to the essential truth that there is always more freedom in the world than the compliant surface of things would lead one to suppose. Thus, the true history of human reason is of necessity a secret history: when the practice of philosophic secrecy is once seen, then the faculty of human reason no longer appears quite as servile and culture-bound as it inevitably does to us.#

Henry Rogers, “An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Jonathan Edwards” (1834)

• Gold must at least glitter, although all that glitters is not gold.#

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1939)

• What fun it would be if one didn’t have to think about happiness!#
• One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.#

Ludwig Von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962)

• Not people with the best eyesight are experts in ophthalmology, but ophthalmologists even if they are myopic.#

Ludwig Lachmann, The Legacy of Max Weber (1971)

• Those whose minds are too absorbed by the problems of the day are unlikely to be good prophets.#

Axel Leijonhufvud, “Whatever Happened to Keynesian Economics?” (1986)

• Precision of utterance is of little help if we cannot keep track of what we are talking about.#

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)

• The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.#

Thomas Szasz, Heresies (1976)

• The more politicians protect people from harming themselves, the more they fail to protect them from being harmed by others.#Quoted in Daniel Klein, “A Plea to Economists who Favor Liberty” (2001)

F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

• Monopoly is certainly undesirable, but only in the same sense in which scarcity is undesirable; in neither case does this mean that we can avoid it. It is one of the unpleasant facts of life that certain capacities (and also certain advantages and traditions of particular organizations) cannot be duplicated, as it is a fact that certain goods are scarce.#
• In order to make ourselves act rationally we often find it necessary to be guided by habit rather than reflection.#

Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

• Like most arguments from analogy, [this] tends rather to amuse the fancy than to give any real information on the subject to which it refers.#

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850)

• It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.#
• Men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work.#

Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will (1525)

• When something stands in broad daylight, and a mass of evidence for it is in broad daylight also, it does not matter whether there is any evidence for it in the dark.#

Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (1898)

• A system is not known in what it has in common with other preceding systems; but that it is distinguished by that in which it differs from those preceding systems.#