A Conservative Handbook of Quotations

It is the curse of our epoch that the educated are uneducated, especially in the study of history - which is only the study of humanity.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

The difficulty of history is that historians seldom see the simple things, or even the obvious things, because they are too simple and obvious.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

What is history but the way in which the spirit of man apprehends events impenetrable to him; unites things when God alone knows whether they belong together.
Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872)

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that he tolerates their existence.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana (1863-1952)

History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.
Arthur Balfour (1848-1930)

A nation that forgets its past has no future.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Study history, study history - in history lie all the secrets of statecraft.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant (1885-1981)

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Abba Eban (1915- )

That men do not learn from history is the most important of all lessons that history has to teach.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

. . . the historian ought to be made to understand that his day is only a day. He is apt to treat it as if it were a day of judgement.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

What one can learn in the case of Christianity - that under the influence of a historical treatment it has became denaturized, until a completely historical, that is to say just treatment resolves it into pure knowledge about Christianity and thereby destroys it - can be studied in everything else that possesses life: that it ceases to live when it is dissected completely, and lives a painful and morbid life when one begins to practice historical dissection upon it.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life."

History, which I always think of side by side with poetry as its opposite, is for time what geography is for space. The latter is, therefore, as little as the former, a science in the proper sense, inasmuch as it has for its object not universal truths, but only particular things . . . It has always been a favourite study with those who like to learn something without undergoing the strain demanded by the sciences properly so called, which bring the intellect into requisition.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Why has psychology - meaning thereby not knowledge of men and experience of life but scientific psychology - always been the shallowest and most worthless of the disciplines of philosophy, a field so empty that it has been left entirely to mediocre minds and barren systematists?
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)
The Decline of the West, Vol I, Ch. IX, I, I

The true meaning of all this talk of psychology is simply this; that those who have failed to improve men by a mechanical method are still trying to improve them in a mechanical spirit. They still think of morality as if it were machinery. It never occurs to them to appeal to will. . . .
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Cheap and pedantic prophesying is the curse and the characteristic weakness of the whole of modern sociology. It is allied to materialism, which is allied to the brutes. It is all based on the assumption that man's future can be calculated like the action of a machine; whereas to be incalculable is the definition of being human; it is only because a man cannot be made a subject of science that there is any fun in being a man.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

If there is a contemptible creature alive, it is the criminologist who explains away crime as the result of poverty, with the delicate implication that it is only from poverty that we need expect crime. The answer to that sort of criminology is simply history, especially the history of crime. The criminologist implies that nobody will sin who is educated at a school for the sons of gentlemen only; and he seems to forget that Borgia and Gilles de Rais and the Marquis de Sade were certainly gentlemen and the sons of gentlemen.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

. . . it is not always a disadvantage to have disadvantages.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

. . . between this stupid scorn of sympathy (which is itself a form of sentimentality) and this sham pretence of sympathy (which is really the reverse of sympathy because it is superiority) - between these two forms of swaggering self-satisfaction the prospects of a real reform in relation to crime are very unsatisfactory. What we want is not all this morbid brooding upon the motives of criminals, not even the more occult problem of the motives of lawyers, but the old historic or prehistoric problem of the motives of law-givers.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

It is tempting to believe that social evils arise from the activities of evil men and that if only good men (like ourselves, naturally) wielded power, all would be well. That view requires only emotion and self-praise. To understand why it is that "good" men in positions of power will produce evil, while the ordinary man without power but able to engage in voluntary cooperation with his neighbors will produce good, requires analysis and thought, subordinating the emotions to the rational faculty.
Milton Friedman (1912- )

... the liberal's operating impulse seems to begin with indignation, a sense of passion, a sense of outrage. A lot of sentences begin, "I' m shocked and appalled." Whereas the conservative's operating impulse seems to be cynicism, kind of a chuckle or a horse laugh.
... the conservative view of the world, because it expects less of human nature, is less indignant, and thus less susceptible to the kind of manic enforcement of taboos that we are beginning to see in American intellectual life and on campus. If you think that human nature is perfectible, you are much more upset if you see deviation.
Dinesh D’Souza
Jan. 1995 – from “Forbidden Thoughts,” a discussion published in American Enterprise by the American Enterprise Institute

All great peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in law, in custom once solemnly established, and now long recognized as just and final.
Thomas Carlyle
1843 - from Past and Present

Socialism is not just a question of labour organization; it is above all an atheistic phenomenon, the modern manifestation of atheism, one more tower of Babel built without God, not in order to reach out toward heaven from earth, but to bring heaven down to earth.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
The Brothers Karamazov

Communism is a religion . . . Jesuits without Jesus.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Those who seek to live your lives for you, to take your liberty in return for relieving you of yours, those who seek to elevate the state and downgrade the citizen, must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for divine will. And this notion was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom.
Barry Goldwater (1909- )

Too many Christian Socialists think of the Kingdom of God as merely a human society in which perfect justice rules and whose members are bound together by perfect human love. It is simply the apotheosis of humanitarianism . . . God for them remains quite in the background.
Egerton Swann
British Christian Socialist leader
written just before World War I

Christianity never promised that it would impose universal peace. It had a great deal too much respect for personal liberty. The sceptical theorist is allowed to throw off Utopia after Utopia, and is never reproached when they are contradicted by the facts, or contradicted by each other. The unfortunate believer is alone always made responsible, and held to account for breaking a promise he never made.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Socialism is a tyranny; that it is inevitably, even avowedly and almost justifiably, a tyranny. It is the pretence that government can prevent all injustice by being directly responsible for practically anything that happens.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

There is only one thing you need to know about socialism and that is: socialism leads to Stalinism.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918- )

No Socialist system can be established without a political police.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Socialism is inseparably woven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. . . . This state is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus-boss.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

The demands of the socialists raise another question, which I have often addressed to them, and to which, as far as I know, they have never replied. Since the natural inclinations of mankind are so evil that its liberty must be taken away, how is it that the inclinations of the socialists are good? Are not the legislators and their agents part of the human race? Do they believe themselves moulded from another clay than the rest of mankind? They say that society, left to itself, heads inevitably for destruction because its instincts are perverse. They demand the power to stop mankind from sliding down this fatal declivity and to impose a better direction on it. If, then, they have received from Heaven intelligence and virtues that place them beyond and above mankind, let them show their credentials. They want to be shepherds, and they want us to be their sheep. This arrangement presupposes in them a natural superiority, a claim that we have every right to require them to establish before we go any further.
Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.
Milton Friedman (1912- )
Capitalism and Freedom

What was wrong with communism wasn't aberrant leadership, it was communism.
William F. Buckley Jr. (1925- )

Whenever socialism has been tried, it has failed.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Let them [leftists] quit these gospels of envy, hate and malice. Let them eliminate them from their politics and programmes. Let them abandon the utter fallacy, the grotesque, erroneous fatal blunder of believing that by limiting the enterprise of man, by riveting the shackles of a false equality . . . they will increase the well-being of the world.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

The Socialists aim at the maximum of regulations and the Conservatives aim at the minimum.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

The idea that a nation can tax itself into prosperity is one of the cruelest delusions which has ever befuddled the human mind.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

I know of no assumption that has been more widely and totally disproved by actual experience than the assumption that if a few people could be prevented from living well, everyone else would live better.
George Kennan (1904- )

Most economic fallacies derive . . . from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
Milton Friedman (1912- )
Free to Choose (with Rose Friedman)

Envy so often motivates the left in its quest for redistribution. The economy is not a zero-sum game, and the wealth of a Bill Gates or a Michael Jordan does not take anything away from me. Indeed, the wealth of others enhances my life. Without the generosity of the rich, directly or through the foundations they have established, many of us who prefer life on a university faculty or at a think tank would have had quite different and less satisfying careers.
Robert H. Bork (1925- )

When the state promises you security, it impedes, almost inevitably, any chance of your long term success. Because when security becomes your goal, risk is to be avoided; when risk is avoided, growth cannot occur; and when growth is nonexistent, the energies, intelligence and self interest that might have gone into creating wealth - expanding the pie - go instead into dividing it up. Our focus, as a society, shifts from opportunity to entitlement.
Theodore J. Forstmann

In America, it is freedom that has always attracted explorers and given life to their ideas. Drawn from every corner of the globe, they expect to succeed. Expectancy produces hope. And hope makes all things possible - hope based on a vision not of bricks and mortar but of first principles: the dignity of the individual, private property rights, and opportunity in the free market. Thus the greatness of America is more than the sum total of its force of arms and the opulence of its economy: Its real power is its vision of an unlimited future.
Barry Asmus

Liberalism has its own history and its own tradition. Socialism has its own formulas and aims. Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interest; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the preeminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks, and shall seek more in the future, to build a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Every ... leftist calls himself a liberal! ... We are the true adherents of liberty. Both words--liberal and liberty--come from the same root. We are the ones who believe in limited government, in the maximization of liberty for the individual and the minimization of coercion to the lowest point compatible with law and order. It is because we are true liberals that we believe in free trade, free markets, free enterprise, private property in the means of production; in brief, that we are for capitalism and against socialism. Yet this is the philosophy, the true philosophy of progress, that is now called not only conservatism, but reaction, the Radical Right, extremism...
Henry Hazlitt
Nov. 29, 1964 - from "Reflections at 70", a speech to friends and admirers at the New York University Club on his 70th birthday

Finally there is what I would call the end of philosophic individualism, or the extinction of the true liberal. The radical survives, and the socialist, but the liberal who was an individualist, a nationalist, and an internationalist -- who was also, be it acknowledged, at his best a humanitarian, and a man of generous instincts and magnanimous mind -- that kind of liberal is gone with the top hat and the frock coat. The world is the poorer for his going, and it behooves conservatives to remember that they are in fact his residuary legatees, and that the liberal spirit now finds almost its sole dwelling place in conservative minds.
William L. Morton
1982 - quoted in Radical Tories, by Charles Taylor

Liberalism is often successful in preempting the debate ... so that [objections to it] appear to have become debates within liberalism. ... So-called conservatism and so-called radicalism in these contemporary guises are in general mere stalking-horses for liberalism: the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question.
Alasdair MacIntyre
1988 - Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

[The conservative] thinks of political policies as intended to preserve order, justice, and freedom. The ideologue, on the contrary, thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In his march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless.
Russell Kirk
1993 - The Politics of Prudence

We're prepared to place our trust in the people to reshape the government. Our liberal friends place their trust in the government to reshape the people.
Newt Gingrich
1998 - from a campaign rally speech

Somehow Liberals have been unable to acquire from birth what Conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government to do good.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Feb. 15, 1969 - from an essay in the New York Post

In assembling a staff, the conservative leader faces a greater problem than does the liberal. In general, liberals want more government and hunger to be the ones running it. Conservatives want less government and want no part of it. Liberals want to run other people's lives. Conservatives want to be left alone to run their own lives.... Liberals flock to government; conservatives have to be enticed and persuaded.
Richard Millhouse Nixon
Leaders

But, by an inference as false as it is unjust, when we oppose subsidies, we are charged with opposing the very thing it was proposed to subsidize and of being the enemies of all kinds of activity, because we want these activities to be voluntary and to seek their proper reward in themselves. Thus, if we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in religious matters, we are atheists. If we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in education, then we hate enlightenment. If we say that the state should not give, by taxation, an artificial value to land or to some branch of industry, then we are the enemies of property and of labour. If we think that the state should not subsidize artists, we are barbarians who judge the arts useless.
Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

But, you say, if foreigners flood us with their products, they will carry off our money! Well, what difference does that make? Men are not fed on cash, they do not clothe themselves with gold, nor do they heat their houses with silver. What difference does it make whether there is more or less money in the country, if there is more bread in the cupboard, more meat in the larder, more clothing in the wardrobe, and more wood in the woodshed?
Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose - because it contains all the others - the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other language nation has ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quality - to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Atlas Shrugged

The process of the creation of new wealth is beneficial to the whole community.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

We are for private enterprise with all its ingenuity, thrift and contrivance, and we believe it can flourish best within a strict and well-understood system of prevention and correction of abuses. In a complex community like our own no absolute rigid uniformity of practice is possible.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization.
Calvin Coolidge
Jan. 17, 1925 - from a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors

There is only one way to kill capitalism - by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Some see private enterprise as a predatory animal to be shot, others look on it as a cow to be milked but a few see it as a sturdy horse pulling a wagon.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

If you destroy a free market, you create a black market.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Private property has a right to be defended. Our civilization is built up by private property and can only be defended by private property.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

It is a great paradox of American life that while zealots are hard at work finding new political rights behind every human yearning, constitutional property rights often go unprotected. I suspect that behind this paradox lies a widely held view that economic rights are somehow not very important.
Our Founding Fathers knew better. They recognized that property rights are the most basic of human rights - the rights of human beings to the use and exchange of goods. They also understood that the right to private property is one of freedom's crucial safeguards. It gives citizens the independence they need to criticize their government without having to worry that the government might retaliate by seizing the source of their livelihood.
Phil Gramm (1942- )

A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.
Colin T. Brown

You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
Rev. William Boetcker

"All men are created equal" says the American Declaration of Independence. "All men shall be kept equal" say the Socialists.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

All men are equal and all distinctions between them are unhealthy and undemocratic.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)
The Constitution of Liberty

The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)
The Constitution of Liberty

From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict which each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

Equality of the general rules of law and conduct, however, is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty and the only equality which we can secure without destroying liberty. Not only has liberty nothing to do with any other sort of equality, but it is even bound to produce inequality in many respects. This is the necessary result and part of the justification of individual liberty: if the result of individual liberty did not demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much of the case for it would vanish.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

[The true conservative is] prepared to defend the full range of natural differences that arise from the free expression of talent and effort in each human being, and thus will refuse in principle to forcibly equalize society. He generally seeks local solutions to human problems rather than any homogenizing state action. He is naturally anti-egalitarian, and finds poisonous and immoral the idea of forcibly levelling society, of trying to raise the weak by weakening the strong.
William D. Gairdner
Sep. 01, 1997 - from "Conservatism in a Nutshell", published on The Canadian Conservative Forum

. . . so that we have the last logical crown and conclusion of the long process of woman condescending to be merely the ape of man. First she demands to have what he has, merely because he has it, and not because it is worth having. And then she takes it for granted because he takes it for granted; and does it thoughtlessly, in order to be as thoughtless as he is.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Feminists are, as their name implies, opposed to anything feminine.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

The family [is] the first essential cell of human society.
Pope John XXIII (1881-1963)

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
Margaret Mead (1901-1978)

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth.
Allan Bloom (1930-1992)
The Closing of the American Mind

We refused to assume . . . one of the central obligations of parenthood: to make ourselves the final authority on good and bad, right and wrong, and to take the consequences of what might turn out to be a lifetime battle.
Midge Decter (1927- )
Liberal Parents, Radical Children

We must develop a fair appreciation for the real strengths and limitations of government effort on behalf of children. Government, obviously, is not a father or mother. Government has never raised a child, and it never will.
William J. Bennett (1943- )

Not everyone wants to make the switch toward reliance upon family, community, and mediating institutions, least of all those in government, academia, and grant-receiving organizations whose careers have rested upon the expansion of the public sector at the (literal) expense of the American family. Artificial segregation of issues has, in the past, fostered highly specialized approaches to various problems. On both the right and the left, think tanks are filled with housing wonks and welfare gurus, education experts and economic development eggheads. I'm convinced that the divisions among them were needlessly deepened, if not created in the first place, by the operational divisions within the federal bureaucracy.
Henry Hyde (1924- )

[Conservatism] Our revolutionary message ... is that a self-disciplined people can create a political community in which an ordered liberty will promote both economic prosperity and political participation.
Irving Kristol
1983 - Reflections of a NeoConservative

The impulse to conservatism comes from the social challenge before the theorist, not the intellectual tradition behind him. Men are driven to conservatism by the shock of events, by the horrible feeling that a society or an institution which they have approved of or taken for granted ... may suddenly cease to exist.
Samuel Huntington
from his essay "Conservatism as an Ideology", published in American Political Science Review

The best way to rear up a new generation of friends of the Permanent Things is to beget children, and read to them o' evenings, and teach them what is worthy of praise: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. As Edmund Burke put it, 'We learn to love the little platoon we belong to in society.' The institution most essential to conserve is the family.
Russell Kirk
1993 - The Politics of Prudence

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it; human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.
Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.
Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. ... Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time.
Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity.
Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems.... The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.
Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectibility.... To seek for utopia is to end in disaster.... All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention and prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order.... The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.
Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.
Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.... In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. Some...are carried out by local political bodies, others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected, they constitute healthy community. But when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in serious danger.
Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.... A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic.
Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.... The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression.... He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.
Russell Kirk
1993 - from "Ten Conservative Principles", in the second chapter of The Politics of Prudence

Anyone who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

If you're not a socialist at 20, you have no heart. If you're still a socialist at 60, you have no brain.
Anonymous, (George Bernard Shaw ? (1856-1950))

There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better."
William Ralph Inge

The intelligent conservative combines a disposition to preserve with an ability to reform.
Russell Kirk
The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Conservatism

Conservative: a statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Ambrose Bierce
1906 - from The Devil's Dictionary

A socialist is someone who believes capitalism is a system based on greed and wants to replace it with a system based on envy.
Anonymous

However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as "the most anti-social and evil of all passions.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

A socialist is someone who thinks a balance sheet is something that keeps the bed from tipping over.
Anonymous

The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.
Ecclesiastes 10:2

The heart is on the left but the billfold is on the right.
Anonymous (Milton Friedman (?) (1912- ))

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.
Raymond Aron (1905-1983)

Marxism is the capitalism of the working class.
August Bebel? (1840-1913), Oswald Spengler? (1880-1936)

To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)

People are more violently opposed to the wearing of fur than leather because it is safer to attack rich women than motorcycle gangs.
bumper sticker

If you have comments or suggestions, email me: