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"By gentlemen are not meant the rich or the poor, the high-born or the low-born, the industrious or the idle; but all those who have received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences, whether by birth they be descended from magistrates and officers of government, or from husbandmen, merchants, mechanics, or laborers; or whether they be rich or poor." John Adams   "Economic history may be thought of as a struggle between a propensity for growth and one for rent-seeking, that is, for someone improving his or her position, or a group bettering its position, at the expense of the general welfare." Eric Lionel Jones   "In their country the same rights, the same privileges are offered to all; industry is an honour, and idleness a disgrace; all a man earns is his own, or goes unimpaired to his children; no beginning is so humble but what it may lead to honour; and every honest exertion is sure of its adequate reward. As long as the institutions of America are productive of such happy results, it is but natural that the people should cling to them as the principal cause of their boundless national prosperity." Francis Joseph Grund   "Religion begot prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother." Cotton Mather   "It seems to me that a potential master of our fates should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of his foreign policy, but about his attitude toward Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only because the lock and stock of literature is indeed human diversity and perversity, it turns out to be a reliable antidote for any attempt—whether familiar or yet to be invented—toward a total mass solution to the problems of human existence. As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine." Joseph Brodsky   "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Samuel Beckett   "I think we scientists need make no apologies. It seems to me that our science is a good model for intellectual activity. We believe in an objective truth that can be known, and at the same time we are always willing to reconsider, as we may be forced to, what we have previously accepted. This would not be a bad ideal for intellectual life of all sorts." Steven Weinberg   "Until we realize that we are choosing between social arrangements which are all more or less failures, we are not likely to make much headway." Ronald Coase   "The conditions of existence forming man's environment, which up to now have dominated man, at this point pass under the dominion and control of man, who now for the first time becomes the real conscious master of nature, because and in so far as he has become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social activity, which have hitherto confronted him as external, dominating laws of nature, will then be applied by man with complete understanding, and hence will be dominated by man." Friedrich Engels   "Marxists paid attention to the peasants only because they looked upon them with the dislike in which the townsman's contempt for all things rural and the economist's disapproval of small-scale production mingled with the bitterness of the revolutionary collectivist against the stubbornly individualistic tiller of the soil." David Mitrany   "The railways, the ports, major irrigation systems, the telegraph, sanitation and medical care, the universities, the postal system, the courts of law, were assets India could not believably have acquired in such extent and quality had it not developed close political links with Britain." Tirthankar Roy   "The alternative to expansion is not, as some occasionally seem to suppose, an England of quiet market towns linked only by trains puffing slowly and peacefully through green meadows. The alternative is slums, dangerous roads, old factories, cramped schools, stunted lives." Edward Heath   "Normally a hero manifests his nature in action, for example, the swift, decisive deeds of Achilles. But Hamlet's chief characteristic throughout most of the play is his hesitation to act, which makes him appear unheroic in any conventional sense. The presence in the play of more conventionally heroic types such as Laertes and the Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, only serves to emphasise the oddity of Hamlet as a hero. But if he is problematic as a hero, the reason is that heroism itself has become deeply problematic in his world (though one hastens to add that because heroism has become problematic does not mean that it has disappeared)." Paul Cantor   "The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I'm having 100% fun." Kurt Cobain   "One of the ideals of our youth is being realized today—the disappearance of borders, the integration of the world's countries into a single system of exchange that benefits everyone, especially those who urgently need to leave underdevelopment behind. But contrary to what we believed would happen, it was not the socialist revolution that made this world one, but its archenemies: capitalism and the market. Still, this is the most beautiful advance in modern history because it lays the foundations for a new civilization on a global scale that organizes itself around political democracy, civil society, economic freedom, and the rights of man." Mario Vargas Llosa   "The government's debt is the American people's debt. If we pay down that debt through higher taxes, we will, for the most part, pay those taxes by drawing down our savings. That's no more 'responsible' than drawing down those savings to finance overconsumption within the household." Steven Landsburg   "Let us get her last curtsey from her as she stands here upon the English shore. When she gets into the Australian woods her back won't bend except to her labour; or, if it do, from old habit and the reminiscence of the old country, do you suppose her children will be like that timid creature before you? They will know nothing of that Gothic society, with its ranks and hierarchies, its cumbrous ceremonies, its glittering antique paraphernalia, in which we have been educated; in which rich and poor still acquiesce, and which multitudes of both still admire: far removed from these old world traditions, they will be bred up in the midst of plenty, freedom, manly brotherhood. Do you think if your worship's grandson goes into the Australian woods, or meets the grandchild of one of yonder women by the banks of the Warrawarra, the Australian will take a hat off or bob a curtsey to the new corner? He will hold out his hand, and say, 'Stranger, come into my house and take a shakedown and have a share of our supper. You come out of the old country, do you! There was some people were kind to my grandmother there, and sent her out to Melbourne. Times are changed since then—come in and welcome!'" William Makepeace Thackeray   "Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had lived before almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors." Adam Smith   "Viceroys, Councillors and Lieutenant-Governors tended to scoff at Simla. Curzon, who claimed to like every place in India except his summer capital, grumbled about having to spend half the year on a single hilltop chained to a sort of middle-class suburb. Lyall thought Simla society was 'silly and simple.' Clinton Dawkins, a Finance Member from London, expressed his amazement at the vulgarity and silliness of English people trying to amuse themselves. These were snooty and insensitive attitudes towards people who had spent the last eleven months in the plains, lonely in the cold weather, sick and uncomfortable in the hot months, and desperate for a fortnight's relaxation." David Gilmour   "In every inquiry concerning the operations of men when united together in society, the first object of attention should be their mode of subsistence. Accordingly as that varies, their laws and policy must be different." William Robertson   "There is not a menace in the world today like that of growing public indebtedness and mounting public expenditure." Warren Harding   "Experts estimate Genghis Khan had several hundred and perhaps more than a thousand children. He took big risks and eventually conquered most of the known world. For him, the big risks led to huge payoffs in offspring. My point is that no woman, even if she conquered twice as much territory as Genghis Khan, could have had a thousand children. Striving for greatness in that sense offered the human female no such biological payoff. For the man, the possibility was there, and so the blood of Genghis Khan runs through a large segment of today's human population. By definition, only a few men can achieve greatness, but for the few men who do, the gains have been real. And we are descended from those great men much more than from other men. Remember, most of the mediocre men left no descendants at all." Roy Baumeister   "Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation. We are no longer the agents of culture, our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years War." Ludwig Deppe   "The percentage of wealth held offshore by wealthy Europeans is over two and a half times higher than by their American peers. By going off the books, Europe's tax exiles lower wealth disparities for all European nations. They do not just shift fortunes from one country to another." Peter Baldwin   "Accumulation has not been the heart of modern economic growth, or of the change from the medieval to the early-modern economy, or from the early-modern to the fully modern economy. It has been a necessary medium, but rather easily supplied, like Shakespeare's alphabet. The substance has been innovation. If you personally wish to grow a little rich, by all means be thrifty, and thereby accumulate for retirement. But a much better bet is to have a good idea and be the first to invest in it. And if you wish your society to be rich you should urge an acceptance of creative destruction and an honoring of wealth obtained honestly by innovation. You should not urge thrift, not much. (Nor should you recommend sheer wealth acquired by stealing, such as the program of making a 'middle class' in certain African countries by enriching the state bureaucrats in the main cities at the expense of farmers.) You should work for your society to be free, and thereby open to new ideas, and thereby educable and ingenious." Dierdre McCloskey   "There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in the entire Red Army." Regis Debray   "The entire dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity." Gustave Flaubert   "The principle of 'to each his own truth' transfers to individuals the privilege that totalitarian societies reserve for the State: a discretionary power over history." Alain Finkielkraut   "But aside from all these problems of expectations, cost, competency, limitations of knowledge, there is the simple reality that every piece of social policy substitutes for some traditional arrangement, whether good or bad, a new arrangement in which public authorities take over, at least in part, the role of the family, of the ethnic and neighborhood group, of voluntary associations." Nathan Glazer