SAY WHAT YOU MEAN

You can reflect what is another’s; You can radiate only what is your own.

—CHINESE PROVERB

THE CONFESSION OF ERROR

To make no mistake is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.

—PLUTARCH

Many people, I suspect, would rather entitle this chapter “the error of confession” than “the confession of error.”

PENALTY OF SURRENDER

It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned. The country . . . deserves repose. And repose can only be found in everlasting principles.

—CHARLES SUMNER

WORSHIP, A SINGULAR THING

If we begin by overrating the being we love, we shall end by treating it with wholesale injustice.

—HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL

During the early days of FEE several of us observed numerous devotees of the freedom philosophy who had but a single standard for gauging truth: would the man they worshiped—admittedly outstanding—agree or not. If their hero said yes, true; if no, false.

THE FEAR OF FREEDOM

To love righteousness or intelligence or outstanding talent or virtue of any sort is to love freedom.

Nearly everyone says he favors freedom, but in reality—with few exceptions in today’s world—most people are “scared to death” of it. This ambivalence is not widely recognized, but it is the same thing as the fear of righteousness or intelligence or outstanding talent or virtue of any sort.

INEQUALITY ENSHRINED

It is not true that equality is the law of nature: nature has made nothing equal.

—MARQUIS DE VANVENARGUES

THE REVEALING SELF

Example is the school of mankind; they will learn at no other.

—EDMUND BURKE

RAILING AGAINST FOLLY

However, not a word more upon this wretched subject, lest I become unwise in railing against folly.

—GOETHE

TIME-LAPSE THINKING

Economics . . . is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some special interest in the short run, but on the general interest in the long run.1

—HENRY HAZLITT

BUY AMERICAN

He that hath a trade hath an estate; and he that hath a calling hath a place of profit and honor. A plowman on his legs is higher than a gentleman on his knees.

—FRANKLIN