Noting the frequent incorporation of historical quotations to buttress these weekly contrarian scribblings, many readers over the last 11 years have asked for a compilation of favorites.
They are far too numerous to reprint them all here, of course. But given the sentiment found in many of them, and given this is the Independence Day weekend, the following brief sampling is quite representative and most apropos:
Alexis de Tocqueville: "(The power of government) covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power ... does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and hard-working animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
Milton Friedman: "It is widely believed that economic arrangements are one thing and political arrangements another, that any kind of economic arrangement can be associated with any kind of political arrangement. This is the idea that underlies such a term as "democratic socialism." ... (This) is a contradiction in terms."
Murray Rothbard: "Government advertising is paid for by means of taxes extracted from the citizens, and hence can go on, year after year, without check. The hapless citizen is cajoled into applauding the merits of the very people who, by coercion, are forcing him to pay for the propaganda. This is truly adding insult to injury."
H.L. Mencken: "The extortions and oppressions of government will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives and disarms the victims -- so long as they are ready to swallow the immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of the archbishop's secretary's nephew's mistress' illegitimate son is a sin against the Holy Ghost."
Jane Jacobs: "Were the involuntary subsidies which make (government economic development) schemes possible included as public costs, the enlarged public costs would bear no conceivable relationship to anticipated tax returns (i.e., increased taxes from the improved area)."
Frank Chodorov: "(Socialism's) undoing will not be accomplished by trying to destroy established socialistic institutions. It can be accomplished only by attacking minds, and not the minds of those already hardened by socialistic fixations. Individualism" -- the core premise of the independence and liberty we celebrate this weekend, I might add -- "can be revived by implanting the idea in the minds of the coming generations."
Ludwig von Mises: "Society lives and acts only in individuals. ... Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle (between freedom and slavery) into which our epoch has plunged us."
G. Warren Nutter: "In an age of romantic pragmatism, such as we now endure, keeping faith with logic, principles, or the facts is likely to be considered a curious eccentricity, perhaps deserving tolerance on occasion but seldom worthy of emulation. ... Rationalization waxes as reason wanes ... ."
Frederic Bastiat: "(A)re the benefits of freedom so well hidden that they are evident only to professional economists⢠Yes, we must admit that our opponents ... have a marked advantage over us. They need only a few words to set forth a half-truth; whereas, in order to show that it is a half-truth, we have to resort to long and arid dissertations."
Jeremy Bentham: "The request of industry to government is as modest as that of Diogenes to Alexander: 'Get out of my light.'"
Henry Hazlitt: "Economics is pre-eminently a practical science. It does no good for its fundamental principles to be discovered unless they are widely understood. In spite of hundreds of economists who have pointed out the advantages of free markets and free trade, the persistence of protectionist illusions has kept protectionist and price-fixing policies alive and flourishing ... ."
Daniel Webster: "Miracles do not cluster. Hold on to the Constitution of the United States of America and the republic for which it stands. ... What has happened once in 6,000 years may never happen again. Hold on to your Constitution, for if the American Constitution shall fail there will be anarchy throughout the world."
Hans L. Eicholz: "Now scholars write, with little apparent embarrassment, that all rights flow from government, are not the gifts of nature or of the divine, and proceed to invoke the Declaration (of Independence) in support of this. The growth of victim-oriented political and legal reform movements is a wonderful example of how far we have moved away from our political origins. " ... No longer Jeffersonian, we have become more European in our political outlook. It is the political and collective definition of self-government to which Americans now refer. Today we ask how people feel about the way the president or Congress is "running" the country, as if there existed a great tiller inside the Oval Office or the halls of Congress.
"The very question could not have been asked in 1776 by an American patriot because it implied the very thing he rejected. Government did not "run" the country; the people, through all their actions and associations, did; and politics was a very tiny part of the equation."
Offered Samuel Johnson in his wonderful 1775 dictionary: "Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language." And, in this instance, to the stability or enlargement of our understanding of what makes a republic, or should make a republic, tick.
Given the current state of our republic and our independence 230 years after Mr. Johnson put pen to paper, it's rather obvious that lots of people have lots of quotes on which to catch up.
