“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
“Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one’s uniqueness, one falls in love with one’s complexity.”
John Fowles in Daniel Martin Chapter 2 according to en.wikiquote.org [a friend had cited a slightly different version from memory at a dinner].
“‘If he is dead to-day,’ he [Phocion to a tumultuous Athenian crowd following a rumour that Alexander the Great had died] said, ‘he will be so to-morrow and the day after to-morrow equally. So that there is no need to take counsel hastily or before it is safe.’”
Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives II
“It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word. The Crusade without the Cross is a dead word.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 12, 1924, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol 10 #5 (March 2007)
He had not “acquired that command over his understanding which would enable him to believe what he wished without evidence”.
Thomas Robert Malthus, quoted by Antony Flew, ed., in the introduction to An Essay on the Principle of Population and A Summary view of the Principle of Population
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Riddle of the Ivy” in Tremendous Trifles, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan/Feb. 2000)
“The view that human beings are by nature good and reasonable creatures who can compose their differences peacefully is incompatible with what we know of human behavior in recorded history. It is starkly utopian.... Order can exist without justice and freedom, as we well know, but justice and freedom cannot exist without order.”
Sidney Hook in American Spectator July 1988
“We do not claim that every normal individual always knows his or her own best interests but that no one else is likely to know them better. That is what Aristotle meant when he wrote that the wearer of shoes knows better than the cobbler whether a shoe pinches.”
William C. Mitchell and Randy T. Simmons Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare, and the Failure of Bureaucracy