Category: Friday Quote

Friday Quote – Peter Boettke

If you bound the arms and legs of gold medal swimmer Michael Phelps, weighed him down with chains, threw him in a pool, and he sank, you wouldn’t call it a “failure of swimming.” So, when markets have been weighed down by inept and excessive regulation, why call this a “failure of capitalism?”

Friday Quote – Carl Sagan

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give the charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Friday Quote – H.L. Mencken

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist… He plans to be both an artist and a moralist – a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community – that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.

Friday Quote – Milton Friedman

Doing good with other people’s money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else’s money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people’s money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force – sending a policeman to take the money from somebody’s pocket – is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.