Great Throughts Treasury

"An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea."

"As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression."

"As freak legislation, the antitrust laws stand alone. Nobody knows what it is they forbid."

"A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."

"As the several items can be exchanged, they must be equal; but in what terms? Not in pounds, yards, or hours; they are equal in value. Then what is wanted is a unit of value to reckon by."

"An army is a diversion of energy from the productive life of a nation."

"But in reason if one man has no right to command all other men--the expedient of despotism--neither has he any right to command even one other man; nor yet have ten men, or a million, the right to command even one other man, for ten times nothing is nothing, and a million times nothing is nothing."

"But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism."

"Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?"

"Freedom is dangerous. Possibly crawling on all fours might be safer than standing upright, but we like the view better up there."

"By stressing intrinsic value in thought. And it is true that when men have become engrossed in practical devices they are apt to narrow their field of vision and lose sight of the interconnection of the various branches of knowledge. More than that, as is now the case, they will even forget the larger principles they have applied, and on which their well-being depends."

"If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish."

"If there were just one gift you could choose, but nothing barred, what would it be? We wish you then your own wish; you name it. Ours is liberty, now and forever."

"If everyone were invariably honest, able, wise, and kind, there should be no occasion for government. Everyone would readily understand what is desirable and what is possible in given circumstances, all would concur upon the best means toward their purpose and for equitable participation in the ensuing benefits, and would act without compulsion or default. The maximum production was certainly obtained from such voluntary action arising from personal initiative. But since human beings will sometimes lie, shirk, break promises, fail to improve their faculties, act imprudently, seize by violence the goods of others, and even kill one another in anger or greed, government might be defined as the police organization. In that case, it must be described as a necessary evil. It would have no existence as a separate entity, and no intrinsic authority; it could not be justly empowered to act excepting as individuals infringed one another's rights, when it should enforce prescribed penalties. Generally, it would stand in the relation of a witness to contract, holding a forfeit for the parties. As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression."

"If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress."

"If the state wants to eliminate prostitution, it would have to kill half of the population."

"If you hear some bad collectivistic notions, chances are that they came from [modern] liberals. But if you hear or read something outrageously, god-awfully collectivistic, you may be sure that the author is a conservative."

"Leadership is obliged to justify itself daily."

"Men are born free, that since they begin with no government, they must therefore institute government by voluntary agreement, and thus government must be their agent, not their superior. Since volition is a function of the individual, the individual has the precedent right. Then even if it was presumed that government did equate roughly with the moral shortcomings of humanity, it should still be limited and subsidiary. If everyone were invariably honest, able, wise, and kind, there should be no occasion for government. Everyone would readily understand what is desirable and what is possible in given circumstances, all would concur upon the best means toward their purpose and for equitable participation in the ensuing benefits, and would act without compulsion or default. The maximum production was certainly obtained from such voluntary action arising from personal initiative. But since human beings will sometimes lie, shirk, break promises, fail to improve their faculties, act imprudently, seize by violence the goods of others, and even kill one another in anger or greed, the government might be defined as the police organization. In that case, it must be described as a necessary evil. It would have no existence as a separate entity, and no intrinsic authority; it could not be justly empowered to act excepting as individuals infringed one another's rights, when it should enforce prescribed penalties. Generally, it would stand in the relation of a witness to contract, holding a forfeit for the parties. As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression."

"More and more of the flow was diverted from production into the political mechanism. Whatever elements in motion compose a stream of energy, enough must go through to complete the circuit and renew production. Water running in an aqueduct to turn a millwheel is a stream of energy; or electricity going through insulated wires; or goods in process from raw materials to finished product and conveyed by a system of transport. If the water channel is pierced with many small openings en route; or electricity taken off by more and more outlets; or the goods expropiated piecemeal at each stage of the process, finally not enough will go through for maintenance of the system. In the energy system comprised in an exchange of goods, the producers and processors have to get back enough to enable them to keep on producing and working up the raw materials and to provide transport..."

"In arguing against free enterprise capitalism, the collectivist always adopts the false assumption of a fixed number of jobs in that system. Conversely, in arguing for collectivism, he always assumes that there will be as many jobs as there are workers. The government will make the jobs."

"In human affairs, all that endures is what men think."

"It takes the best part of a lifetime to find out what you don't want."

"Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends... when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object."

"Money is indispensable to a long-circuit heavy load energy system. It must be used when a sufficient surplus is being produced to allow a margin for exchange, and cost of transport, over a considerable distance. Money represents a storage battery when idle, and a generalized mode of the conversion of energy when it is in motion, with a function of equating time and space."

"Newton was asked as a mathematician, not as a moralist. He replied 'Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit."

"No law can give power to private persons; every law transfers power from private persons to government."

"Now the sole remedy for the abuse of political power is to limit it; but when politics corrupt business, modern reformers invariably demand the enlargement of the political power."

"Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure."

"One genius is about all a house will hold."

"Not uncommonly one hears some romantic young woman say, 'Oh, I would give anything to be a writer.' But she would not; and 'anything' is not enough. One must give everything."

"Poverty can be brought about by law; it cannot be forbidden by law."

"People mostly do as they like, and that would be fine if they'd let other people do the same."

"Right now it is a terrible thing to be a rugged individualist; but we don?t know what else to be except a feeble nonentity."

"The craving for power is in itself a sign of inferior abilities and unfitness for responsibility."

"The great truth is that women actually like men, and men can never believe it."

"The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action."

"The biggest pests are the people who use altruism as an alibi. What they passionately wish is to make themselves important."

"The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly."

"The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God."

"The objection to profit is as if a bystander, observing the planter digging his crop, should say: You put in only one potato and you are taking out a dozen. You must have taken them away from someone else; those extra potatoes cannot be yours by right. If profit is denounced, it must be assumed that running at a loss is admirable. On the contrary, that is what requires justification. Profit is self-justifying."

"The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people."

"There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure."

"These are not sentimental considerations; they constitute the mechanism of production and therefore of power. Personal liberty is the pre-condition of the release of energy. Private property is the inductor which initiates the flow. Real money is the transmission line; and the payment of debts comprises half the circuit. An empire is merely a long circuit energy-system. The possibility of a short circuit, ensuing leakage and breakdown or explosion, occurs in the hook-up of political organization to the productive processes. This is not a figure of speech or analogy, but a specific physical description of what happens."

"The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race."

"The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through and by others."

"What kind of world does the humanitarian contemplate as affording him full scope? It could only be a world filled with breadlines and hospitals, in which nobody retained the natural power of a human being to help himself or to resist having things done to him. And that is precisely the world that the humanitarian arranges when he gets his way."

"When the word leader, or leadership, returns to current use, it connotes a relapse into barbarism. For a civilized people, it is the most ominous word in any language."

"Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status."

"What the past shows, by overwhelming evidence, is that the imponderables outweigh every material article in the scales of human endeavor."