Some inspirational and mostly political, philosophical, and economic quotes that are too good to get lost:
“There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets.” — Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” —John Quincy Adams
“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” —Harper Lee
“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.” —Stephen Covey
“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.” — Mahatma Gandhi
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin
“Those who say it can not be done, should not interrupt those doing it.” — Chinese proverb
“People inspire you or they drain you – pick them wisely.”— Hans F. Hansen
“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.” — Denis Waitley
“The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.” ― Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart
“Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?” ― Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely. [Pournelle’s Law of Bureaucracy]” ― Jerry Pournelle
“The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.” – Albert Camus
“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” ― Frederic Bastiat
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?” ― Frederic Bastiat, The Law
“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.” ― Frederic Bastiat, The Law
“Too many wars are fought almost as if by rote. Too many wars are fought out of sloganry, out of battle hymns, out of aged, musty appeals to patriotism that went out with knighthood and moats. Love your country because it is eminently worthy of your affection. Respect it because it deserves your respect. Be loyal to it because it cannot survive without your loyalty. But do not accept the shedding of blood as a natural function or a prescribed way of history—even if history points this up by its repetition. That men die for causes does not necessarily sanctify that cause. And that men are maimed and torn to pieces every fifteen and twenty years does not immortalize or deify the act of war… find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow-man.” – Rod Serling (WWII veteran, Twilight Zone creator), 1968.
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” – H. L. Mencken
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” – H. L. Mencken
“Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” – H.L. Mencken
“It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.” – H. L. Mencken
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H. L. Mencken
“It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.” – H. L. Mencken
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” – H. L. Mencken
“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” – H. L. Mencken
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” – Horace Mann, 1859
“The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing which is the truth.” – Ezra Pound
“The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, ‘See if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.'” – Harry Browne
“There are no violent gangs fighting over aspirin territories. There are no violent gangs fighting over whisky territories or computer territories or anything else that’s legal. There are only criminal gangs fighting over territories covering drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other victimless crimes. Making a non-violent activity a crime creates a black market, which attracts criminals and gangs, which turns what was once a relatively harmless activity affecting a small group of people into a widespread epidemic of drug use and gang warfare.” – Harry Browne
“Government is force, pure and simple. There’s no way to sugar-coat that. And because government is force, it will attract the worst elements of society – people who want to use government to avoid having to earn their living and to avoid having to persuade others to accept their ideas voluntarily.” – Harry Browne
“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” ― Ayn Rand
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” ― Ayn Rand
“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.” ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
“Libertarianism is ‘cultish,’ say the sophisticates. Of course, there’s nothing cultish at all about allegiance to the state, with its flags, its songs, its mass murders, its little children saluting and paying homage to pictures of their dear leaders on the wall, etc.” ― Thomas E. Woods Jr.
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.” ― F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
“The State says that citizens may not take from another by force and against his will that which belongs to another. And yet the State…does just that.” – Murray Rothbard
“The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State…is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.” – Murray Rothbard
“It is easy to be conspicuously ‘compassionate’ if others are being forced to pay the cost.” – Murray Rothbard
““It is no crime to be ignorant of economics…But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” – Murray Rothbard
The ‘boom-bust’ cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business.” – Murray Rothbard
“The threat of gold redeemability imposes a constant check and limit on inflationary issues of government paper. If the government can remove the threat, it can expand and inflate without cease. And so it begins to emit propaganda, trying to persuade the public not to use gold coins in their daily lives.” – Murray Rothbard
“It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by those receipts.” – Murray Rothbard
“The man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, ‘Limit yourself’; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.” – Murray Rothbard
“Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?” – Murray Rothbard
“The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is to inflate and to destroy the value of the currency.” – Murray Rothbard
“The more the government intervenes to delay the market’s adjustment, the longer and more grueling the depression will be, and the more difficult will be the road to complete recovery.” – Murray Rothbard
“Who wants good people in government? Good people should be in the private sector. Helping us out, helping themselves out in the private sector. We want schmoes in government. We want people who can’t find the doorknob. Why waste productive people, as well as looting the taxpayer?” – Murray Rothbard
“It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.” – Murray Rothbard
“If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and . . . try freedom.” – Murray Rothbard
“While big-business leaders and firms can be highly productive, servants of consumers in a free market economy, they are also all too often, seekers after subsidies, contracts, privileges, or cartels furnished by big government. Often, business lobbyists and leaders are the sparkplugs for the statist, interventionist system.” – Murray Rothbard
“Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.” ― Hans-Hermann Hoppe
“The state is the result of aggressive force and subjugation. It has evolved without contractual foundation, just like a gang of protection racketeers.” ― Hans-Hermann Hoppe
“Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.” – Ludwig von Mises
“If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.” – Ludwig von Mises
“Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.” – Ludwig von Mises
“Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.” – Ludwig von Mises
“No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.” – Ludwig von Mises
“He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.” – Ludwig von Mises
“The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.” – Ludwig von Mises
“Capitalism is essentially a system of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. It pours a horn of plenty upon the common man. It has raised the average standard of living to a height never dreamed of in earlier ages. It has made accessible to millions of people enjoyments which a few generations ago were only within the reach of a small élite.” – Ludwig von Mises
“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.” – Robert Higgs
“We need to understand the more government spends, the more freedom is lost…Instead of simply debating spending levels, we ought to be debating whether the departments, agencies, and programs funded by the budget should exist at all.” – Ron Paul
“In the American political lexicon, ‘change’ always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.” – Ron Paul
“It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.” – Ron Paul
“They don’t attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They attack us because we’re over there.” – Ron Paul
“Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war, anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon.” – Ron Paul
“The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. It is this one-two punch– Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference– that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars.” – Ron Paul
“Remember, politicians get votes by promising everything to everyone, always at the expense of some other invisible taxpayers.” – Ron Paul
“I want to be president mainly for what I don’t want to do: I don’t want to run your life, I don’t want to run the economy, and I don’t want to police the world.” – Ron Paul
“The reality is that our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people that live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas. We would not stand for it here, but we have had a globe-straddling empire and a very intrusive foreign policy for decades that incites a lot of hatred and resentment toward us.” – Ron Paul
“To condemn free-market capitalism because of anything going on today makes no sense. There is no evidence that capitalism exists today. We are deeply involved in an interventionist-planned economy that allows major benefits to accrue to the politically connected of both political parties. One may condemn the fraud and the current system, but it must be called by its proper names Keynesian inflationism, interventionism, and corporatism.” – Ron Paul
“Is it any more moral to dilute the value of the purchasing power of the money you hold in your wallet than it is for the farmer to dilute the milk supply with water?” – Ron Paul