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"We found that even when good things occurred that weren't earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people's well-being. It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive." Martin Seligman   "The ability to grow, the ability to make things, is the measure of man's welfare on this earth. To be free, man must be creative. I am a liberal because I believe that in our industrial age there is no limit to the productive capacity of any man. And so I believe that there is no limit to the horizon of the United States. I say that we must substitute for the philosophy of distributed scarcity the philosophy of unlimited productivity. I stand for the restoration of full production and reemployment by private enterprise in America. And I say that we must henceforth ask certain questions of every reform, and of every law to regulate business or industry. We must ask: Has it encouraged our industries to produce? Has it created new opportunities for our youth? Will it increase our standard of living? Will it encourage us to open up a new and bigger world?" Wendell Willkie   "There was no danger of revolution under Louis XV, though his court, his nobility, and his people, were tainted with every vice that can debase a nation. It was not till the strength of the government had been paralysed by the amiable concessions of the vacillating Louis XVI that the catastrophe came." Robert Cecil   "Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it." Friedrich Nietzsche   "What greater fault than that by which we all die? And what greater goodness than that by which we are freed from death? And certainly, unless Adam had sinned, it would not have behooved our Redeemer to take on our flesh. Almighty God saw beforehand that from that evil because of which men were to die, He would bring about a good which would overcome that evil. How wonderfully the good surpasses the evil, what faithful believer can fail to see? Great, indeed, are the evils we deservedly suffer in consequence of the first sin; but who of the elect would not willingly endure still worse evils, rather than not have so great a Redeemer?" Gregorius Anicius   "Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?" Michel Foucault   "The property of the country belongs to the people of the country. Their title is absolute. They do not support any privileged class; they do not need to maintain great military forces; they ought not to be burdened with a great array of public employees. They are not required to make any contribution to government expenditures except that which they voluntarily assess upon themselves through the action of their own representatives. Whenever taxes become burdensome a remedy can be applied by the people; but if they do not act for themselves, no one can be very successful in acting for them." Calvin Coolidge   "Nothing that a man has been, is, or will be, is something he has been, is, or will be forever; rather, it is something he became one day and will stop being the next." José Ortega Y Gasset   "In the late Victorian period disillusionment with domesticity and the hankering after a bracing men-only world were what attracted many to careers overseas. On the eve of his departure to join Milner's administration in the Transvaal in 1901, John Buchan described himself as 'thoroughly undomesticated.' While at home he had become alienated from the adhesive closeness of his family life, in South Africa he shared a bachelor house with other 'kindergarten' members (Milner's young men) and was constantly on horseback. The motives of emigrants and officials who spent a lifetime overseas are not easy to reconstruct, since their surviving private papers seldom predate the voyage out. But that same sense of liberation is perfectly conveyed in the diary of a young mineral prospector who arrived in Bulawayo in 1888: an emigrant from Cumberland of one year's standing, Benjamin Wilson—known to Rhodesian posterity as 'Matabele' Wilson—happily took stock of his new circumstances: There is no old woman here to tell you 'You are looking pale' or 'Oh, I am sorry to see you looking so bad,' or having people fooling around you with a cup of tea or soup or other things you do not want. Empire was actively embraced by young men as a means of evading or postponing the claims of domesticity. In England masculine identity was subject to constant negotiation with the opposite sex—and on domestic ground where they were often perceived to hold the advantage. By contrast the colonial world was thought of as a men-only sphere." John Tosh   "I said to myself every day, I am an important person, because I am not just going to rejoin middle-class society." Kathy Boudin   "Does the Mahatma practice what he preaches? One does not like to make personal reference in an argument which is general in its application. But when one preaches a doctrine and holds it as a dogma there is a curiosity to know how far be practices what he preaches. It may be that his failure to practice is due to the ideal being too high to be attainable; it may be that his failure to practise is due to the innate hypocrisy of the man. In any case he exposes his conduct to examination and I must not be blamed if I asked how far has the Mahatma attempted to realize his ideal in his own case. The Mahatma is a Bania by birth. Its ancestors had abandoned trading in favour of ministership which is a calling of the Brahmins. In his own life, before he became a Mahatma when occasion came for him to choose his career he preferred law to scales. On abandoning law he became half saint and half politician. He has never touched trading which is his ancestral calling." Bhimrao Ambedkar   "The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism." Karl Popper   "We may preach till we are tired of the theme, the necessity of disinterestedness in republics, without making a single proselyte. The virtuous declaimer will neither persuade himself nor any other person to be content with a double mess of porridge, instead of a reasonable stipend for his services. We might as soon reconcile ourselves to the Spartan community of goods and wives, to their iron coin, their long beards, or their black broth. There is a total dissimulation in the circumstances, as well as the manners, of society among us; and it is as ridiculous to seek for models in the simple ages of Greece and Rome, as it would be to go in quest of them among the Hottentots and Laplanders." Alexander Hamilton   "A great mistake has been to imagine that an ideology consists of a set of answers to neutral questions; whereas in fact it consists in the questions." Kenneth Minogue   "State? What is that? Well then, open your ears to me, for now I shall speak to you about the death of peoples. State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells its lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the State, am the people.' This is a lie!" Friedrich Nietzsche   "You have only to give women the same opportunities as men, and you will soon find out what is or is not in their nature. What is in women's nature to do they will do, and you won't be able to stop them. But you will also find, and so will they, that what is not in their nature, even if they are given every opportunity, they will not do, and you won't be able to make them do it." Clare Booth Luce   "There is not a man under the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him." Frederick Douglass   "Just for fun, find a Marxist college professor—who scoffs at the idea that people work less if they lose the incentive of money—how he would feel if his name were not put on any of the academic articles he published. Instead, the articles would be published under the name of another academic who needed the recognition more than he did. After all, he would still have the satisfaction of having written the articles. Why shouldn't that be enough? His completely reasonable response would be that he earned the right to have his name on those articles, and denying him that measure of earned success is viciously unfair." Arthur Brooks   "Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." Alexis de Tocqueville   "Not self-defence, but aggrandizement, is the sense which foreign listeners put upon our words. Not simply to protect what we have, and that merely against unfair arts, not against fair rivalry; but to add to it more and more without limit, is the purpose for which foreigners think we claim the liberty of intermeddling with them and their affairs. If our actions make it impossible for the most prejudiced observer to believe that we aim at or would accept any sort of mercantile monopolies, this has no effect on their minds but to make them think that we have chosen a more cunning way to the same end. It is a generally accredited opinion among Continental politicians, especially those who think themselves particularly knowing, that the very existence of England depends upon the incessant acquisition of new markets for our manufactures; that the chase after these is an affair of life and death to us; and that we are at all times ready to trample on every obligation of public or international morality, when the alternative would be, pausing for a moment in that race." John Stuart Mill   "Every act of discovery involves two critical steps: first, unambiguously stating your conjecture of what might be true, and second devising a crucial experiment to treat your conjecture." Vilayanur Ramachandran   "The conquerors of our days, peoples or princes, want their empire to possess a unified surface over which the superb eye of power can wander without encountering any inequality which hurts or limits its view. The same code of law, the same measures, the same rules, and if we could gradually get there, the same language; that is what is proclaimed as the perfection of the social organization." Benjamin Constant   "Under my reign, a man such as Beaumarchais would have been shut up in the madhouse. This would have been denounced as an arbitrary act, but what a service it would have rendered to society!" Napoleon Bonaparte   "Typically, guilds regulated entry to trades and held down firm-size by limiting the number of apprentices a craftsman might take. They determined prices, qualities, and even quantities of goods that might be produced. In other words they acted as local monopolies protecting the incomes of their members, not least from mutual competition. There is even a story of 123 members of a Chinese gold-beaters' guild who jointly ate a fellow member who had offended by taking on a large number of apprentices." Eric Lionel Jones   "Both Keynes and the German bankers were wildly astray in their predictions. The reparations paid by Germany in 1920 and 1923 amounted to between 4 and 7 percent of national income. In the hardest year, 1921, the figure was 8.3 percent. This compares to estimates by Keynes that the reparations agreed to at Versailles would cost between 25 and 50 percent of German national income. The amounts paid were, in fact, considerably less than the reparations France had made to Germany between 1871 and 1873, which amounted to 9 percent of national product in one year and 16 percent in the next. Moreover, the German economy was not at the time saddled with unmanageable levels of debt. The ratio of German debt to gross national product in 1921 was actually less than that of Britain. The inflationary spiral of 1923 was not due to reparations payments but to the irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies adopted by the Germans themselves." Keith Windschuttle   "Looking back, it is remarkable to what extent America lost is collective nerve when faced with the Japanese economic challenge, and to what degree many of its decision makers actually believed that Japan would be soon taking over as the world's leading economic power. Ishihara was right when he wrote about the congressmen who 'were actually brandishing sledgehammers, smashing Toshiba electronic equipment, with their sleeves rolled up. It was just ugly to watch them behave so.' A fearful U.S. Congress forced the Japanese automakers to adopt 'voluntary' export quotas, and in 1987 it imposed a 100 percent tariff on Japanese goods ranging from computer disk drives to TV sets. In the same year, it began to fund Sematech, an industry-government consortium of 14 U.S. semiconductor companies formed to prevent what appeared to be Japan's coming total dominance of that critical industrial sector." Vaclav Smil   "The community as a whole cannot hope to gain by making artificially scarce what the country wants." John Maynard Keynes   "When a man produces a commodity and exchanges it for money or some other commodity, he does so because the exchange confers an advantage. The advantage secured is the measure of the remuneration or the profit upon production. Hence we say that trade is conducted upon the lines of mutual advantage. As civilization advances the circle of exchange not only widens but becomes increasingly diversified and complex. The principle on which trade is conducted, however, remains the same; and a simple illustration will suffice to explain this. Three men, a tailor, a shoemaker, and a baker produce clothes, boots, and bread. Each requires, in addition to the commodities which he manufactures, the commodities manufactured by the other two. But each can with the greatest ease supply himself with the product of his own craft, he devotes his surplus time to supplying the other two, and in exchange gets the produce of their labour, so that all three finally get boots, bread, and clothes much more easily and much more cheaply than if each had resolved to do all these things himself." William Hamilton   "The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle." Hannah Arendt   "By modern standards, making a living in Tudor England was difficult and precarious; by contemporary European standards, however, it was comparatively easy. Social and economic difficulties there certainly were, but they were not worsened by taxes arbitrarily imposed by a foreign emperor, brutal inquisition and thousands of heretic burnings, mass murder in a capital city, and unremitting religious war that extinguished the trade of a great commercial centre. Elizabethan England was blessed with internal peace, if not with universal concord; with the possibility of economic development, if not the consistent fact of it; and with monarchical stability, if not with security on the scores of marriage and succession. Elizabethan popular literature emerged in a country that enjoyed what, by European standards, can be described only as domestic bliss." Laura Caroline Stevenson