“[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.
“[O]bscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.”
-Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land.
“Freedom of thought, in any valuable sense, includes freedom of speech.”
-J.B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought
Posted in Free Speech, Great Thinkers, Pith
“Great men have two lives; one which occurs while they work on this earth; a second which begins at the day of their death and continues as long as their ideas and conceptions remain powerful.”
-Adolph A. Berle
Berle wrote those words a bout FDR. I read them in a biography of Pericles. May they also apply to great thinkers from John Locke to Adam Smith Charles Darwin to F.A. Hayek, all the way on down to today’s bright lights of liberalism who are alive and well.
Posted in Philosophy, Pith
Tagged adolph berle, david hume, f.a. hayek, fdr, grat men, great men, hayek, hume, john locke, locke, pericles, pith, quotations, quotes
Echoes of both Kant, and of human decency:
“[I]t is always immoral to treat men as means and not ends.”
-Bertrand de Jouvenel, Capitalism and the Historians (F.A. Hayek, ed.), p.96
Posted in Books, History, Pith
Tagged bertrand de jouvenel, categorical imperative, de jouvenel, kant, means and ends
“[I]f it is too pessimistic a view that man learns nothing from history, it may well be questioned whether he always learns the truth.”
-Capitalism and the Historians, (F.A. Hayek, ed.), p.3
Posted in Great Thinkers, History, Pith
Tagged capitalism and the historians, hayek, History
Politics vs. principle:
“The citizen is influenced by principle in direct proportion to his distance from the political situation.”
-Milton Rakove, early 20th century political scientist and father of the historian Jack Rakove.
Posted in Pith, Political Animals
“The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.”
-Adlai Stevenson
Posted in Elections, Pith, Political Animals
Tagged adlai stevenson, campaign, election, pith, politicians, politics, quotations, quotes
Before there were lawyers, there were philosophers. The Sophists, given a bad name by Plato, earned their bread by teaching people how to plead their cases in court. There being no professional lawyers in 5th century B.C. Athens, people had to represent themselves. Witness this tale (probably too good to be true) of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras:
It is said that [Protagoras] taught a young man on the terms that he should be paid his fee if the young man won his first law-suit, but not otherwise, and that the young man’s first law-suit was one brought by Protagoras for recovery of his fee.
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 75.
