“Free markets must be defended on moral grounds. We must convince our fellow man there cannot be personal liberty in the absence of free markets, respect for private property rights and rule of law. Even if free markets were not superior wealth producers, the morality of the market would make them the superior alternative.”
Walter E. Williams, “Foreword” to Friedrich Hayek The Road to Serfdom [Readers’ Digest condensed edition] with The Intellectuals and Socialism
“‘Tis sometimes the height of wisdom to feign stupidity.”
Cato the Elder (quoted on www.quotationspage.com/quotes.php3?author=Cato+the+Elder)
“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion (this quotation, verbatim or slightly modified, has been misattributed to others including Robert Oppenheimer)
“the recovering secularist must acknowledge that he has been too easy on religion. Because he assumed that it was playing a diminishing role in public affairs, he patronized it. He condescendingly decided not to judge other creeds. They are all valid ways of approaching God, he told himself, and ultimately they fuse into one. After all, why stir up trouble by judging another's beliefs? It's not polite. The better option, when confronted by some nasty practice performed in the name of religion, is simply to avert one's eyes. Is Wahhabism a vicious sect that perverts Islam? Don't talk about it. But in a world in which religion plays an ever larger role, this approach is no longer acceptable. One has to try to separate right from wrong. The problem is that once we start doing that, it's hard to say where we will end up.”
David Brooks, “Breaking the Secularist Habit,” in The Atlantic Monthly March 2003
“I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.”
Franklin Roosevelt, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail October 3, 2008
“A man who does not lose his reason over certain things has none to lose.”
Gotthold Lessing (1729-81), quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail August 22, 2000
“History is not a social science but an unavoidable form of thought. That ‘we live forward but we can only think backward’ is true not only of the present (which is always a fleeting illusion) but of our entire view of the future: for even when we think of the future we do this by remembering it. But history cannot tell us anything about the future with certainty.”
John Lukacs, At the End of an Age
“My house, my car, my family may be a lot of responsibility, but I would rather take that responsibility than have any of you dating my wife or backing my car into phone poles or leaving your dirty socks on my bedroom floor. (Although when it comes to the kids, if any of you want to baby-sit for free, I’m willing to share.)”
P.J. O’Rourke to the 25th anniversary of the Cato Institute, in Cato Policy Report July/August 2002