25 Great Quotations

1. “Of what use is it to sheep that no one abridges their freedom of speech? They stick to bleating.” Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own.

2. “Right – is a wheel in the head, put there by a spook; power – that am I myself, I am the powerful one and owner of power.” Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own.

3. “Because I cannot grasp the moon, is it therefore to be “sacred” to me, an Astarte? If I only could grasp you, I surely would, and, if I only find a means to get up to you, you shall not frighten me!” Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own.

4. “You start back in fright before others, because you think you see beside them the ghost of right, which, as in the Homeric combats, seems to fight as a goddess at their side, helping them. What do you do? Do you throw the spear? No, you creep around to gain the spook over to yourselves, that it may fight on your side: you woo for the ghost’s favor. Another would simply ask thus: Do I will what my opponents wills? “No!” Now then, there may fight for him a thousand devils or gods, I go at him all the same!” Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own.

5. “The German people and German peoples have behind them a history of a thousand years: what a long life! O, go to rest, never to rise again – that all may become free whom you so long have held in fetters. The people is dead – Up with me!” Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own.

6. “If you showed folks that their egoism demanded that they busy themselves with State affairs, you would not have to call on them long; if, on the other hand, you appeal to their love of fatherland and the like, you will long preach to deaf hearts in behalf of this “service of love.”.” Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own.

7. “A historian or an ethnographer who neglects in his work to take full advantage of the results of economics is doing a poor job. In fact he does not approach the subject matter of his research unaffected by what he disregards as theory. He is at every step of his gathering of allegedly unadulterated facts, in arranging these facts, and in his conclusions derived from them, guided by confused and garbled remnants of perfunctory economic doctrines constructed by botchers in the centuries preceding the elaboration of an economic science and long since entirely exploded.” Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

8. “If and as far as labor under the division of labor is more productive than isolated labor, and if and as far as man is able to realize this fact, human action itself tends toward cooperation and association; man becomes a social being not in sacrificing his own concerns for the sake of a mythical Moloch, society, but in aiming at an improvement in his own welfare.” Ludwig von Mises, Human Action.

9. “Man is not a being who cannot help yielding to the impulse that most urgently asks for satisfaction. Man is a being capable of subduing his instincts, emotions, and impulses; he can rationalize his behavior. He renounces the satisfaction of a burning impulse in order to satisfy other desires. He is not a puppet of his appetites. A man does not ravish every female that stirs his senses; he does not devour every piece of food that entices him; he does not knock down every fellow he would like to kill. He arranges his wishes and desires into a scale, he chooses; in short, he acts. What distinguishes man from beasts is precisely that he adjusts his behavior deliberatively. Man is the being that has inhibitions, that can master his impulses and desires, that has the power to suppress instinctive desires and impulses.” Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

10. “One must not tell the masses: Indulge in your urge for murder; it is genuinely human and best serves your well-being. One must tell them: If you satisfy your thirst for blood, you must forego many other desires. You want to eat, to drink, to live in fine homes, to clothe yourselves, and a thousand other things which only society can provide. You cannot have everything, you must choose. The dangerous life and the frenzy of sadism may please you, but they are incompatible with the security and plenty which you do not want to miss either.” Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

11. “The direction of all economic affairs is in the market society a task of the entrepreneurs. Theirs is the control of production. They are at the helm and steer the ship. A superficial observer would believe that they are supreme. But they are not. They are bound to obey unconditionally the captain’s orders. The captain is the consumer. Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that. If a businessman does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt, and is thus removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him.” Ludwig von Mises, Human Action.

12. “(Demagogues) tell us that these associations of bankers and manufacturers are the true rulers of their countries and that the whole apparatus of what they call “plutodemocratic” government is dominated by them. A simple enumeration of the laws passed in the last decades (1920s and 1930s) by any country’s legislature is enough to explode such legends.” Ludwig von Mises, Human Action.

13. “In every sphere of his practical activity man has developed a technique or a technology that indicates how one is to proceed if one does not want to behave in an unreasonable way. It is generally acknowledged that it is desirable for a man to acquire the techniques which he can make use of in life, and a person who enters a field whose techniques he has not mastered is derided as a bungler. Only in the sphere of social policy, it is thought, should it be otherwise. Here, not reason, but feelings and impulses should decide. The question: How must things be arranged in order to provide good illumination during the hours of darkness? is generally discussed only with reasonable arguments. As soon, however, as the point in the discussion is reached when it is to be decided whether the lighting plant should be managed by private individuals or by the municipality, then reason is no longer considered valid. Here sentiment, world view – in short, unreason – should determine the result. We ask in vain: Why?” Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism In The Classical Tradition.

14. “the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson.

15. “Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.” Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson.

16. “This question of legal plunder must be settled once and for all, and there are only three ways to settle it: 1. The few plunder the many. 2. Everybody plunders everybody. 3. Nobody plunders anybody. We must make our choice among limited plunder, universal plunder, and no plunder. The law can follow only one of these three.” Frederic Bastiat, The Law.

17. “Whenever someone starts talking about “fair competition” or indeed, about “fairness” in general, it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked.” Murray Rothbard, Protectionism and the Destruction of Prosperity.

18. “In short, public creditors are willing to hand over money to the government now in order to receive a share of tax loot in the future. This is the opposite of a free market, or a genuinely voluntary transaction. Both parties are immorally contracting to participate in the violation of the property rights of citizens in the future. Both parties, therefore, are making agreements about other people’s property, and both deserve the back of our hand. The public credit transaction is not a genuine contract that need be considered sacrosanct, any more than robbers parcelling out their shares of loot in advance should be treated as some sort of sanctified contract.” Murray Rothbard, “Repudiating the National Debt”.

19. “It is curious, once more, that the very writers who complain most of the wiles and lures of advertising never apply their critique to the one area where it is truly correct: the advertising of politicians…. the consumers have always at hand a simple and pragmatic test of success: does the product work and work well? In public economic affairs, there is no such test, for no one can know whether a particular policy has “worked” or not without knowing the a priori reasoning of economics.” Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State.

20. “Furthermore, the “modern democrat” who scoffs at direct democracy on the ground that the people are not intelligent or informed enough to decide the complex issues of government, is caught in another fatal contradiction: he assumes that the people are sufficiently intelligent and informed to vote on the people who will make these decisions. But if a voter is not competent to decide issues A, B, C, etc., how in the world could he possibly be qualified to decide whether Mr. X or Mr. Y is better able to handle A, B, or C? In order to make this decision, the voter would have to know a great deal about the issues and know enough about the persons whom he is selecting. In short, he would probably have to know more in a representative than in a direct democracy.” Murray Rothbard, Power And Market.

21. “The environmental movement maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is safe, or even to bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area in which, until recently, no one – not even the staunchest supporters of science and technology – had ever thought to assert very much confidence at all. The one thing the environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in them is forecast the weather – for the next one hundred years!” George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.

22. “They (the great American industrialists of the 19^th century) were neither robbers nor barons, but in the highest rank of capitalist producers, whose great self-enrichment was the measure of their enrichment of the general public. They did not steal their wealth but created it, in the process greatly enriching others, not impoverishing them. They were in fact among the greatest benefactors of mankind in all of history.” George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.

23. “For the 90 percent to seek to steal the wealth of the 10 percent is to destroy the creation of the wealth that serves them. It is to begin with no concept of the production of wealth and how it is accumulated, but instead with the myth of the “distribution fairy,” and from there to go to envy and resentment, from there to theft, and with theft, to the destruction of the incentives to saving, efficiency, and the accumulation of capital. The result is that those whose heads are empty of the knowledge of how wealth is produced and accumulated come to live in a world that is physically empty of the production and accumulation of wealth.” George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.

24. “The propaganda of the redistributors and socialists has always depicted the capitalists as rich fat men, whose larders are overflowing, while the plates of the poor are empty. It has demanded that the capitalists’ wealth be shared for purposes of mass consumption. Since, in reality, the wealth of the capitalists is overwhelmingly in the form of factories and other capital goods, this has all along been a blatant demand for capital decumulation. The poor are to be benefitted by consuming the capital that underlies the productivity of labor and the payment of wages, and without which production must plunge. Thus, practically on its face, redistributionism has been a policy of destruction.” George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.

25. “For after all is said and done, it is something on the order of a mere 10 percent of the overall, total consumption of the economic system that turns out to be the grand prize for which the redistributors and socialists have been clamoring all these years! This is the great fund of wealth by means of which they have expected to abolish all poverty, cure disease, and achieve utopia; and for the sake of which they have been ready to overturn existing society, seize private property, and shed rivers of blood – all in magnificent obliviousness to the fact that capitalism itself gratuitously provides such wealth over and over again every few years, through economic progress and an accompanying 2 or 3 percent annual rate of improvement in the productivity of labor.” George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.