 Luxury is the roadmaker of progress.
Ludwig von Mises
Socialism
The federal man gets to tell you what your labours are worth, and he pays you in company scrip, promissory IOUs, except you, not he, is the lender; he is the market’s only buyer and the market’s only seller. You plays and you pays and you pays, from the sweat of your brow and the pain of your bones until the organs finally give out. So don’t go whining to me about $3 gas.It’s the $20 an hour that I am giving up to Greenspan that pisses me off – especially when Alan and his greenie whore at the network use it to mess with ... discounted working stiffs like me.
David Bond
http://www.silverminers.com/Editorials.aspx?id=1
When A takes money from B to give to C, and A is a legislator, the process is called taxation. But when A is an officer or director of a corporation, it is called philanthropy.
Warren Buffett
Investor Words Quote of the Day http://www.investorwords.com
Once again Paul Krugman has failed to win the Nobel Prize in economics. This year's winners are Robert J. Aumann and Thomas C. Schelling, "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis." Why them, and not Krugman? One clue is Aumann's academic affiliation. He is with the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Krugman isn't at the center of anything. And he has nothing to do with rationality.
Don Luskin
Don Luskin's Blog: The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid
Well, the world needs ditch-diggers, too.
Judge Elihu Smails
The Ninth Amendment amounts to the phrase: "insert political philosophy here." In referring to other rights not enumerated in the Constitution, it invites judges to refer to basic principles of political philosophy to define what those rights might be. And I don't think the Founders ever imagined the controversy that would follow from this, since they all accepted the natural rights philosophy of Locke as proven and universal.
Robert Tracinski
The Intellectual Activist Daily
I don't build in order to have [profits]. I have [profits] in order to build.
Ayn Rand
A bastardization of a favourite Roark quote used to settle the question of whether profits are an end in themselves. They are not.
You ever notice how we're a big country with a diverse population, but the only two people we can get to run for office are two people you wouldn't even trust to take your laundry to the laundromat. "Hey George can you,... nevermind I'll take them myself" "But I can..." ""No just sit here. Don't touch anything! Don't do anything! Don't mess anything up! And PLEASE don't talk!"
Henry Rollins
Talk is Cheap
Home is where the heart is, but the stars are made of Latinum.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Ferengi Rule of Acquisition No. 75
The American people believe that they have a God-given right to as many health care services as they want, paid for by someone else.
Arnold Kling
EconLog weblog, Sept. 14, 2005
Only an idiot – someone utterly ignorant of basic principles of economics, and of the morality of free-market capitalism – would decry business profits or would think that “price-gouging” is a bad thing.
Dr. David N. Mayer
http://users.law.capital.edu/dmayer/Blog/
SOS: I'm being attacked by the perpetual "quote" block in the threads.
source of quote
The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H. Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.
Robert Anson Heinlein
http://atheism.about.com/library/quotes/bl_q_RHeinlein.htm
She was a great man whose only fault was in being a woman.
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Commenting on scientist Emilie du Chatelet
The only thing money gives you is the freedom of not worrying about money.
Johnny Carson
Investor Words Quote of the Day http://www.investorwords.com
The uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived, is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration. Like the unknown principle of animal life, it frequently restores health and vigour to the constitution, in spite, not only of the disease, but of the absurd prescriptions of the doctor.
Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations, Book II Chapter III
Some claim that majoritarianism, despite its faults, is an alternative preferable to physical conflict. They're wrong: majoritarianism is physical conflict. Elections are a process of counting fists, rather than noses, and saying, 'We outnumber — we could beat you up and kill you — you might as well give in and save everyone a lot of trouble.' Majoritarianism, to put it straightforwardly, possesses the full measure of nobility manifested by any other form of extortion.
L. Neil Smith
"PIZZACRACY: Majoritarianism Versus Unanimous Consent""
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
Ayn Rand
“Man's proper stature is not one of mediocrity, failure, frustration, or defeat, but one of achievement, strength, and nobility. In short, man can and ought to be a hero.”
Mike Mentzer
At best, one can say that humans TEND to be this or that. And that is hardly a fitting basis for constructing a universal human morality.
Nathan Hawking
SoloHQ
For when men... have once surrendered their minds and have given their allegiance to the opinion of some man, they bring no enlargement to the sciences themselves, but merely act as servile functionaries and attendants to glorify certain authors...
Francis Bacon
The Great Instauration, Preface
Imagine a world ...in which the principle of private ownership of the means of production is fully realized, in which there are no institutions hindering the mobility of capital, labor, and commodities, in which the laws, the courts, and the administrative officers do not discriminate against any individual or groups of individuals whether native or alien. Imagine a state of affairs in which governments are devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual's life, health, and property against violent aggression. In such a world the frontiers are drawn on the maps, but they do not hinder anybody from the pursuit of what he thinks will make him more prosperous. No individual is interested in the expansion of the size of his nation's territory, as he cannot derive any gain from such an aggrandizement. Conquest does not pay and war becomes obsolete.
Ludwig von Mises
Respected Objectivists, I warn you, due to my admiration for your integrity and moral standards, not to fall into the intellectual trap that is SoloHQ, populated not by Objectivists but by post-modern nihilists/hedonists in Objectivist guise.
G. Stolyarov II
Email to Chicago Objectivist Group 05/30/05
Price is what you pay. Value is what you receive.
Warren Buffett
I don’t like bullshiters, I don’t like schmoozers and I don’t like arselickers.
Sir Alan Sugar (The Apprentice)
If men were like ants, there would be no interest in human freedom. If individual men, like ants, were uniform, interchangeable, devoid of specific personality traits of their own, then who would care whether they were free or not? Who, indeed, would care if they lived or died? The glory of the human race is the uniqueness of each individual, the fact that every person, though similar in many ways to others, possesses a completely individuated personality of his own. It is the fact of each person's uniqueness—the fact that no two people can be wholly interchangeable—that makes each and every man irreplaceable and that makes us care whether he lives or dies, whether he is happy or oppressed. And, finally, it is the fact that these unique personalities need freedom for their full development that constitutes one of the major arguments for a free society.
Murray N. Rothbard
Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism and the Division of Labor
Augustus didn't pave the way for Nero and other tyrants. Instead, he built an empire that would endure their coming.
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
Freedom isn't free and someone must do what they must to preserve it.
Sgt. Donald R. Walters
Fallen Iraq war hero. From a personal letter - now inscribed on his memorial.
I'm a free market nut.
Tom DeLay
How can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by its own exertions?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Frank, Leonard Roy. Freedom. New York: Random House, 2003.
The mind cannot for long play the role of the heart.
La Rochefoucauld
Maxims
If we resist our passions, it is more through their weakness than through our strength
La Rochefoucauld
Maxims
Give me the storm and stress of thought and action rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will but first let me eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
Robert Ingersoll
When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.
Joseph Stalin
It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.
Winston Churchill
http://www.investorwords.com
Salem purified itself nearly to death but in the end some good may have come of it. I am not historian enough to assert this as fact, but I have often wondered if the witchhunt may have helped to spawn, 100 years later, the Bill of Rights, particularly the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits forcing a person to testify against himself — something that would have stopped the witch-hunt in its tracks.
Arthur Miller
As individuals, we can certainly refuse to buy products from countries that engage in unsavory practices and encourage others to join our boycott. However, by making the boycott a national policy, we take away the personal freedom of our neighbors and impose our will on them. In other words, we try to change an oppressive regime abroad by becoming oppressors ourselves at home! The result: less freedom in the world, instead of more.
Mary Ruwart
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.
Lin Yutang
Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.
Winston Churchill
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Ayn Rand
http://www.InvestorWords.com Quote of the Day November 29, 2004
Money, which represents the prose of life, and is hardly spoken of in parlors without apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Investor Words Quote of the Day -- http://www.investorwords.com
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
"If the truth about a person's own agenda is unpleasant and toxic to them and everyone else, then it makes no real sense for any of us to suffer through that in silence like a good boy, so that the damaging parties can continue on their merry ways, with no feedback discomfort while they try to guilt others into doing so. They should have a mirror held up to themselves, so that they have to face their true ugliness and destructiveness. It's called "a-c-c-o-u-n-t-a-b-i-l-i-t-y", and all people of quality choose it as a course of life"
Orion Reasoner
SOLO
Command-style economics is a little like steroids in athletics: You get a burst of rapid growth when the drugs first take hold, but after a while you realize that your national testicles are shrinking.
Glenn Reynolds
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6168202/#041004
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
Ernest Hemingway
http://www.tradersclub.com/dollarsign/quotes.shtml
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose."
John Maynard Keynes
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 235ff
The weakness of men is the facade of strength; the strength of women is the facade of weakness.
Attorney Ronald K. Henry
THE MYTH OF MALE POWER, by Warren Farrell, Ph.D.
Plunder, which plays such an important role in the affairs of the world, has but two instruments: force and fraud, and two impediments: courage and knowledge.
Frederic Bastiat
Economic Sophisms
We cannot prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much reason. On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
Thomas Babington Macaulay
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