Quotes

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. . . . The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. . . . It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

Adam Smith, "Wealth of Nations” (1776), his seminal treatise on capitalism

You don't pay any attention to what your parents tell you, but you watch the way they live their lives

Tom Waits

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

Anonymous

Certainly no nation ever before abandoned to the avarice and jugglings of private individuals to regulate according to their own interests, the quantum of circulating medium for the nation -- to inflate, by deluges of paper, the nominal prices of property, and then to buy up that property at 1s. in the pound, having first withdrawn the floating medium which might endanger a competition in purchase. Yet this is what has been done, and will be done, unless stayed by the protecting hand of the legislature. The evil has been produced by the error of their sanction of this ruinous machinery of banks; and justice, wisdom, duty, all require that they should interpose and arrest it before the schemes of plunder and spoilation desolate the country.

Thomas Jefferson to William C Rives, 1819

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

H L Mencken

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde

But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, page 184

If men were angels we would need no government, or even laws.

James Madison

When you look at the mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s, they were clearly amateurish. It is hard to imagine that happening again—we understand the business cycle much better.

Greg Mankiw, Harvard economist and textbook author, Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2000

When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Aldous Huxley

You can depend on Americans to finally, after exhausting all other possibilities, do the correct thing.

Winston Churchill

The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.

Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

H L Mencken