QUOTATIONS
…I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind.
—David Ricardo[1]
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.
—Paul Johnson[2]
We do not live in the past, but the past in us.
—Ulrich Bonnell Phillips[3]
You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan[4]
Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
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Thomas Sowell[5]
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The gods mercifully gave mankind this little moment of peace between the religious fanaticisms of the past and the fanaticisms of class and race that were speedily to arise and dominate time to come.
—G.M. Trevelyan[6]
The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
—Eric Hoffer[7]
There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men.
—Edmund Burke[8]
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm— but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
—T. S. Eliot[9]
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
—F. A. Hayek[10]
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
—Sir Walter Scott[11]
This war was a revolution against the moral basis of civilization. It was conceived by the Nazis in conscious contempt for the life, dignity and freedom of individual man and deliberately prosecuted by means of slavery, starvation and the mass destruction of noncombatants’ lives. It was a revolution against the human soul.
—Time[12]
…mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent…
—Adam Smith[13]
There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.
—Eric Hoffer[14]
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
—Thomas Sowell[15]
We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
—Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes[16]
Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false.
—Charles Sanders Peirce[17]
If I could think that I had sent a spark to those who come after I should be ready to say Goodbye.
—Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes[18]
SOURCES
[1] David Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Volume VII: Letters 1816–1818, edited by Piero Sraffa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 372.
[2] Paul Johnson, The Quotable Paul Johnson: A Topical Compilation of His Wit, Wisdom and Satire, edited by George J. Marlin, et al (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1994), p. 138.
[3] Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South: Selected Essays in Economic and Social History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), p. 269.
[4] Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), p. 95.
[5] Thomas Sowell, Social Justice Fallacies, (New York: Basic Books, 2023), p. 100.
[6] G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1942), p. 339.
[7] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), p. 107.
[8] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dent, 1967), p. 249.
[9] T.S. Eliot, “The Cocktail Party,” The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), p. 348.
[10] Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 239.
[11] Sir Walter Scott, Marmion (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), p. 192.
[12] “Victory in Europe,” Time, May 14, 1945, p. 17.
[13] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), p. 88.
[14] Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (New York: Harper & Row, 1955), p. 111.
[15] Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics, revised and enlarged edition (New York: Basic Books, 2016), p. 365.
[16] Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Law and the Court,” Collected Legal Papers (New York: Peter Smith, 1952), pp. 292–293.
[17] Charles Sanders Peirce, Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), p. 35.
[18] Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes, edited by Max Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 451.