I don’t know which is the more useful to the state: a well-powdered lord who knows precisely when the king gets up in the morning… or a great merchant who enriches his country, sends orders from his office to Surat or Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the world.

I found this quotation on page 398 of Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity. Too good not to share.

Fortune can bestow no higher benefit upon us, than the discord of our enemies.

-Tacitus, Germania, 33.179

“The furious behavior of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies.”

-Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

“[S]uch is the excellence of your judgment that it was ever contrary to that of the people’s.”

Indeed.

[O]nly 38% of Americans say Obama definitely was born in the USA, and 18% say he probably was. Fifteen percent say he probably was born in another country, and 9% say he definitely was born elsewhere.

Republicans are inclined to say the president was born abroad by 43%-35%.

What makes this poll useful? As Oscar Wilde once explained, “By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country, p. 133

“There is nothing so absurd which has not sometimes been asserted by some philosophers.”

-Cicero, De Divinatione, ii, 58.

“But he was primarily an artist and therefore knew that in nature the intermediary colors predominate and an absolute white and an absolute black are rarely found.”

-Hendrik WillemVan Loon, describing Desiderius Erasmus‘ The Praise of Folly.

Wise words for Republicans, Democrats, good-government types, anarchists, and all the other ideologies that suffer from too much Certainty.

“[T]he law ought always to trust people with the care of their own interest, as in their local situations they must generally be able to judge better of it than the legislature can do.”

-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Ch. 5.

This sentence must have had a tremendous influence on Hayek’s thought.

“To err is human; to get paid for it, you have to be an economist.”

-Larry Sabato, on unemployment projections being 100,000 off from what was released today.