Maybe this will be a hit or miss, but the low content threads worked out so well why not a low content quote thread? Can range from any subject to any purpose (quoting Plato to quoting absurd statements from political candidates to something you recently read in a book that stuck out to you), but something that’s not common or that can be easily found on the internet (not everything we’ve already heard from Rothbard or Mises for example). I’ll start.
As we can have no legal knowledge as to who votes from choice, and who from the necessity thus forced upon him, we can have no legal knowledge, as to any particular individual, that he voted from choice; or, consequently, that by voting, he consented, or pledged himself, to support the government. Legally speaking, therefore, the act of voting utterly fails to pledge any one to support the government. It utterly fails to prove that the government rests upon the voluntary support of anybody. On general principles of law and reason, it cannot be said that the government has any voluntary supporters at all, until it can be distinctly shown who its voluntary supporters are.
As taxation is made compulsory on all, whether they vote or not, a large proportion of those who vote, no doubt do so to prevent their own money being used against themselves; when, in fact, they would have gladly abstained from voting, if they could thereby have saved themselves from taxation alone, to say nothing of being saved from all the other usurpations and tyrannies of the government. To take a man’s property without his consent, and then to infer his consent because he attempts, by voting, to prevent that property from being used to his injury, is a very insufficient proof of his consent to support the Constitution. It is, in fact, no proof at all. And as we can have no legal knowledge as to who the particular individuals are, if there are any, who are willing to be taxed for the sake of voting, we can have no legal knowledge that any particular individual consents to be taxed for the sake of voting; or, consequently, consents to support the Constitution.
Character is what you are in the dark. - Dwight L. Moody
Only individuals have free will, systems do not. - P. J. O’Rourke
Notice how the idea of collective entitlement is much more popular than the idea of collective forfeiture. Very, very rarely does somebody volunteer to go to jail because the other members of his ethnic group have been running the protection rackets in Brooklyn for decades. - P. J. O’Rourke
“The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.”- Alexis de Tocqueville
They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State. - Bastiat
What would we think of a proposal for the government, Federal or State, to use the taxpayers’ money to set up a nationwide chain of public newspapers, and compel all people, or all children, to read them? What would we think furthermore of the government’s outlawing all other newspapers, or indeed outlawing all newspapers that do not come up to the “standards” of what a government commission thinks children ought to read? Such a proposal would be generally regarded with horror in America, and yet this is exactly the sort of regime that the government has established in the sphere of scholastic instruction. - Murray Rothbard
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. – Goethe
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. – Barry Goldwater
It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. – Charles A. Beard
Can our form of government, our system of justice, survive if one can be denied a freedom because he might abuse it? – Harlon Carter
I believe that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other men’s rights. – Abraham Lincoln
First they came for the Jews, but I did nothing because I’m not a Jew. Then they came for the socialists, but I did nothing because I’m not a socialist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I did nothing because I’m not a Catholic. Finally, they came for me, but by then there was no one left to help me. – Martin Niemöller
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free. – P.J. O’Rourke
Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. – Douglas Casey
If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist. – Joseph Sobran
Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. – Frederic Bastiat
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? – Thomas Jefferson
War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results. – Joseph Sobran
Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. – Robert Nozick
The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words. – The Atlanta Journal
What’s just has been debated for centuries but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you – and why? – Walter Williams
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license. – P.J. O’Rourke
Don’t do drugs because if you do drugs you’ll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison. – John Hardwick
When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.
When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.
When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don’t own a gun.
Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet. – Lyle Myhr
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
I am convinced that we can do to guns what we’ve done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control. – George L. Roman
Just popped open the document where I put good quotes from Mises’ Theory and History, so all of these quotes are from that book:
The concept of absolute and eternal values is an indispensable element in this totalitarian ideology
All branches of big business cater directly or indirectly to the needs of the common man. The luxury industries never develop beyond small-scale or medium-size units. The evolution of big business is in itself proof of the fact that the masses and not the nabobs are the main consumers. Those who deal with the phenomenon of big business under the rubric “concentration of economic power” fail to realize that economic power is vested in the buying public on whose patronage the prosperity of the factories depends. In his capacity as buyer, the wage earner is the customer who is “always right.”
The truth is that the concept of socialism did not originate from the “proletarian mind.” No proletarian or son of a proletarian contributed any substantial idea to the socialist ideology. The intellectual fathers of socialism were members of the intelligentsia, scions of the "bourgeoisie/’ Marx himself was the son of a wellto-do do lawyer. He attended a German Gymnasium, the school all Marxians and other socialists denounce as the main offshoot of the bourgeois system of education, and his family supported him through all the years of his studies; he did not work his way through the university. He married the daughter of a member of the German nobility; his brother-in-law was Prussian minister of the interior and as such head of the Prussian police. In his household served a maid, Helene Demuth, who never married and who followed the Marx menage in all its shifts of residence, the perfect model of the exploited slavey whose frustration and stunted sex life have been repeatedly depicted in the German “social” novel. Friedrich Engels was the son of a wealthy manufacturer and himself a manufacturer; he refused to marry his mistress Mary because she was uneducated and of “low” descent; he enjoyed the amusements of the British gentry such as riding to hounds.
Nothing demonstrates more emphatically the temporal limitations on human planning than the venerable ruins scattered about the surface of the earth.
Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought. The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned or, at least, adds something new to it. One utterly misconstrues the feats of the pioneer in reducing them to the instruction he got from his teachers. No matter how efficient school training may be, it would only produce stagnation, orthodoxy, and rigid pedantry if there were no uncommon men pushing forward beyond the wisdom of their tutors.
The mathematical economists reiterate that the plight of mathematical economics consists in the fact that there are a great number of variables. The truth is that there are only variables and no constants. It is pointless to talk of variables where there are no invariables.
From Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human, Section Eight: A Look at the State.
“Paragraph” 446
A question of power, not justice. For men who always consider the higher usefulness of a matter, socialism, if it really is the uprising against their oppressors of people oppressed and kept down for thousands of years, poses no problem of justice (with the ludicrous, weak question: “How far should one yield to its demands?”), but only a problem of power ( “To what extent can one use its demands?”). So it is like a natural power-steam, for example-which is either forced by man, as a god of machines, into his service, or, when there are mistakes in the machine (that is, errors of human calculation in its construction), wrecks itself and the human with it. To solve that question of power, one must know how strong socialism is, and in which of its modifications it can still be used as a mighty lever within the current political power game; in some circumstances one would even have to do everything possible to strengthen it. With every great force (even the most dangerous), humanity must think how to make it into a tool of its own intentions.
Socialism gains a right only when the two powers, the representatives of the old and new, seem to have come to war, but then both parties prudently calculate how they may preserve themselves to best advantage, and this results in their desire for a treaty. No justice without a treaty. Until now, however, there has been neither war in the indicated territory, nor treaties, and thus no rights, and no “ought” either.
“Paragraph” 473
Socialism in respect to its means. Socialism is the visionary younger brother of an almost decrepit despotism, whose heir it wants to be. Thus its efforts are reactionary in the deepest sense. For it desires a wealth of executive power, as only despotism had it; indeed, it outdoes everything in the past by striving for the downright destruction of the individual, which it sees as an unjustified luxury of nature, and which it intends to improve into an expedient organ of the community. Socialism crops up in the vicinity of all excessive displays of power because of its relation to it, like the typical old socialist Plato, at the court of the Sicilian tyrant; it desires (and in certain circumstances, furthers) the Caesarean power state of this century, because, as we said, it would like to be its heir. But even this inheritance would not suffice for its purposes; it needs the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed. And since it cannot even count any longer on the old religious piety towards the state, having rather always to work automatically to eliminate piety (because it works on the elimination of all existing states), it can only hope to exist here and there for short periods of time by means of the most extreme terrorism. Therefore, it secretly prepares for reigns of terror, and drives the word “justice” like a nail into the heads of the semi-educated masses, to rob them completely of their reason (after this reason has already suffered a great deal from its semi-education), and to give them a good conscience for the evil game that they are supposed to play.
Socialism can serve as a rather brutal and forceful way to teach the danger of all accumulations of state power, and to that extent instill one with distrust of the state itself. When its rough voice chimes in with the battle cry “As much state as possible,” it will at first make the cry noisier than ever; but soon the opposite cry will be heard with strength the greater: “As little state as possible.”
I always felt bad for doing this - so here is the full “quote” I butcherd from “Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum” / “The Ego and It’s Own”
“I sing because - I am a singer. But I use you for it because I - need ears.
Where the world comes in my way - and it comes in my way everywhere - I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but - my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.”
“The truth apparent - apparent to the eyes of all who are not blinded by dogmatism - is that men are perhaps weary of Liberty. They have a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer the virgin, chaste and severe, to be fought for … we have buried the putrid corpse of liberty … the Italian people are a race of sheep.”
“The Rational theory of Price formation not only has nothing to do with the concepts of experimental psychololgy, but has nothing to do with psychology of any kind, which desires to be a ‘science’ going beyond evderyday experience…the theory of marginal utility and subjective value are not psychology - but rather ‘pragmatically based’ i.e. they use the categories of end and means”
AEN: How do you see the relationship of the Keynesians to the Austrians?
Lachmann: Now, this is a bit more difficult because the question arises, “Who now are the Keynesians?” I did notice that a certain economist whom I always thought was a Keynesian has described himself as a nonmonetarist. So, it seems to me, that Austrians and Keynesians have certain things in common. They have a common methodology, which in the case of the Austrians is laid down of course in Mises Human Action. And which I would say so far as Keynes was concerned is expressed as you know succinctly in the famous letter to Roy Harrod of July 16, 1938, that I have quoted several times: “Economics is not a natural science. It has to deal with human purposes.” That as it were unites us with the Keynesians as against certain other economists, this kind of subjectivism. What also I take it we have in common is a general interest in the facts. After all, we are living in the same world, and it is assumed we accept that facts matter, a proposition which in Chicago doesn’t seem to be so readily accepted. But if we admit that facts matter, then we should be able to establish those facts.
AEN: You mentioned the comment by Keynes in which he made a methodological statement. In fact most Keynesians, at least in the United States, follow a methodology that limits itself to a study of averages and aggregates. Is it possible to see this relationship when, in fact, they for the most part operate with a methodological holism?
Lachmann: I don’t know what you have in mind, and then of course the question again arises who is a Keynesian? I would point out, for instance, that in a book like Paul Davidson’s Money and the Real World, subjectivism is after all present. I wouldn’t know any good examples of what you call methodological holism. The mere fact that someone deals with macroaggregates does not necessarily mean that he is not methodologically an individualist. This was, I think, brought out quite well by Frank Hahn, in his famous critique of Friedman. I would say the mere fact that some economists are interested in macroaggregates does not necessarily impair their methodological subjectivism. It still leaves the avenue open for explaining the phenomena pertaining to macroaggregates ultimately in terms of human motives, as, for instance, Keynes did himself when he tried to split up the demand for money (money as a macroaggregate) into the famous motives. That was an attempt at subjectivism, at least.
I’m reading Kripke’s Naming and Necessity and this made me chuckle.
“It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It’s wrong. You may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place; but I hope not, because I’m sure it’s wrong too if it is a theory.”
Something more unordinary for this forum. This is from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.
Listen, Kamala, when you throw a stone into the water, it finds the quickest way to the bottom of the water. It is the same when Siddhartha has an aim, a goal. Siddhartha does nothing; he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he goes through the affairs of the world like the stone through the water, without doing anything, without bestirring himself; he is drawn and lets himself fall. He is drawn by his goal, for he does not allow anything to enter his mind which opposes his goal. That is what Siddhartha learned from the Samanas. It is what fools call magic and what they think is caused by demons. Nothing is caused by demons; there are no demons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.
In a way, yes, and still am. I sit, I wait, I think, and wonder what’s to happen next, but more often lately than before time seems to be pressed heavy against action. I’m going to be 23 in January, I left school, and I work a low end job - this seems to be of my choosing my sitting, waiting, and thinking. It usually does not have a large affect on me, but lately I’ve contrasted my life’s “success” or “progress” with others - something I generally don’t do, and everyone my age is now graduating college and looking for careers if they don’t already have them. I really have no interest or idea of what career I’d have, besides sitting, waiting, and thinking. I wonder what’s to come, what change is next.
Just as Siddhartha I had a “pilgrimage”, it led to some events that led to a rather large change, and in following months a complete fall that led to an “awakening”, I feel like I’m waiting on another pilgrimage, fall, and awakening as of lately. This time it seems to be going against the grain, or the idea of it, because it seems I’ve chose a rather complicated life by not doing what people typically do. I guess it’s wishful thinking that by my ways I’ll come out on top in some way.