Isabel Paterson Quotes
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The biggest pests are the people who use altruism as an alibi. What they passionately wish is to make themselves important.
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Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure.
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But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism.
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As freak legislation, the antitrust laws stand alone. Nobody knows what it is they forbid.
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An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea.
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If you hear some bad collectivistic notions, chances are that they came from [modern] liberals. But if you hear or read something outrageously, god-awfully collectivistic, you may be sure that the author is a conservative.
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Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
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Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse or omission.
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The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race.
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If there were just one gift you could choose, but nothing barred, what would it be? We wish you then your own wish; you name it. Ours is liberty, now and forever.
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Right now it is a terrible thing to be a rugged individualist; but we don't know what else to be except a feeble nonentity.
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The great truth is that women actually like men, and men can never believe it.
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The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.
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What kind of world does the humanitarian contemplate as affording him full scope? It could only be a world filled with breadlines and hospitals, in which nobody retained the natural power of a human being to help himself or to resist having things done to him. And that is precisely the world that the humanitarian arranges when he gets his way.
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The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.
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Leadership is obliged to justify itself daily.
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As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.
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The craving for power is in itself a sign of inferior abilities and unfitness for responsibility.
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It takes the best part of a lifetime to find out what you don't want.
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People mostly do as they like, and that would be fine if they'd let other people do the same.
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Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?
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The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others.
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There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.
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If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.
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The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people.
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Freedom is dangerous. Possibly crawling on all fours might be safer than standing upright, but we like the view better up there.
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If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress.
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Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. He has had the benefit of every heroic and intellectual effort men have made for many thousands of years, realized at last. If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.
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A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
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The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.
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