Quotes to inspire and reflect

The market economy as such does not respect political frontiers. Its field is the world.

Laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: Let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.

His servants he, with new acquist

Best image of myself and dearer half.

From morn

Belial, in act more graceful and humane;

The imperial ensign, which full high advanced

What I have spoken, is the language of that

Where glowing embers through the room

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence.

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key, perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.

Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. . . . But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!

For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.

A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

I forgot in Camelot

I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

The heart can push the sea and land

Unearned increment of value.

Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.

Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea.

So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything that is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural.

Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself.

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust.

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.

[ On the completion of the Sistine chapel ceiling :] I’ve finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied.

There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Love is the most fun you can have without laughing.

It might be a good idea to relate strip-teasing in some way . . . to the associated zoölogical phenomenon of molting. . . . A resort to the scientific name for molting, which is ecdysis, produces both ecdysist and ecdysiast.

Life may not exactly be pleasant, but at least it is not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband’s clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

The Klan is actually as thoroughly American as Rotary or the Moose. Its childish mummery is American, its highfalutin bombast is American, and its fundamental philosophy is American. The very essence of Americanism is the doctrine that the other fellow, if he happens to be in a minority, has absolutely no rights—that enough is done for him when he is allowed to live at all.

The average man doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be safe.

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

The old game, I suspect, is beginning to play out, even in the Bible Belt.

No sane man, employing an American plumber to repair a leaky drain, would expect him to do it at the first trial, and in precisely the same way no sane man, observing an American Secretary of State in negotiation with Englishmen and Japs, would expect him to come off better than second best. Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards.

Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes. . . . They are the supreme realists of the race.

Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

How long will the human race sweat under the superstition that, in order to be happy and useful and intelligent, it is necessary to believe in things? What nonsense indeed! Human progress consists, not in acquiring beliefs, but in getting rid of them.

LOVER. An apprentice second husband; victim no. 2 in the larval stage.

ADULTERY. Democracy applied to love.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.