A few of my favorite quotes*
To think or not to think
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.
Henry
Ford
Johnny
can’t read.
Don Henley
Johnny
can’t think.
Robert Whitaker
The
problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read.
The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think.
The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses
it with feeling.
Thomas Sowell
Any man
who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over
30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
Winston Churchill
To be
able to be caught up into the world of thought—that is educated.
Edith Hamilton
It is
the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without
accepting it.
Aristotle
It is
significant that the nationalization of thought has proceeded everywhere
pari passu with the nationalization of industry.
E.H. Carr
Government and Economics
There
ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Anonymous
The
lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show
conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and
moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.
To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle
destroyer of the human spirit.
It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state.
They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
Frederich Bastiat
Power
corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton
No one
will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are
not trying to solve our problems.
They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected
and re-elected are number one and number two.
Whatever is number three is far behind.
Thomas Sowell
Government is not the doctor, it is the disease.
Milton Friedman
The
welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses.
It is about the egos of the elites.
Thomas Sowell
Government’s view of the
economy could be summed up in a few short phrases:
If it moves, tax it. If
it keeps moving, regulate it.
And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Ronald
Reagan
When
you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.
James Dale Davidson
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Thomas Sowell
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill
The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.
Ronald Reagan
Once politics becomes a tug-of-war for shares of the national economic pie, decent government is impossible.
F.A.
Hayek
Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one’s wishes.
Nikita Khrushchev
Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways, hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And it is the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism.
Frederic Bastiat
I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
Will Roger
No
man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in
session.
Mark Twain
The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom.
Lord Acton
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
Milton Friedman
Elections should be held on April 16th—the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.
Thomas Sowell
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
F.A. Hayek
Tariff
policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly
invisible. Politicians love
this. The reason is simple:
The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the
victims don’t know whom to blame for their calamity.
Walter E. Williams
When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.
Frederich Bastiat
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
Milton Friedman
Human envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, nor sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as ‘the most anti-social and evil of all passions.
F.A. Hayek
Bureaucracies—Including
Universities
People who enjoy meetings should never be in charge of anything.
Thomas Sowell
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
Thomas Sowell
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
Thomas Paine
A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.
Milton Berle
The specialized bureaucrat—the educrat
(All quotes in this section by
Debra J. Saunders)
What is
the difference between an educator and an educrat?
Simply put, educrats believe in process—as opposed to educators, who
believe in results.
Educrats care if children feel good about reading.
Educators care if children can read.
Educrats say they want children to think for themselves, then make them work
in groups.
Educrats think a class is doing well if the students are performing at the
same level. Educators want
better students to do better.
Can a
teacher be an educrat? Yes,
although I should think most teachers are educators, not educrats.
(Bet that a teacher with a Ph.D. in education is an educrat, one with
a Ph.D. in math is an educator.)
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*One of the hazards of
compiling a list of quotes is that invariably someone will declare that the
person to whom the quote is attributed never actually said or wrote the
specific passage, or else that someone else said it first.
However, I don’t care. I
like the quotes, and if the persons credited in my list did not say or write
the particular words, they should have.
So, unless the quote is attributed to YOU and you did not say it,
please don’t bother to email me a correction.