Quotes From My Favorite Thinkers
This is a landing spot for various quotes that I love from thinkers I greatly admire.
Woody Allen:
80% of success is just showing up
Frédéric Bastiat:
In the sphere of economics an action, a habit, an institution or a law engenders not just one effect but a series of effects. Of these effects only the first is immediate; it is revealed simultaneously with its cause, it is seen. The others merely occur successively, they are not seen; we are lucky if we foresee them.
The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
Donald Boudreaux:
A society truly free tolerates all peaceful actions, from the sublime to the self destructive.
Bryan Caplan:
While progress always hurts someone, the secret of mass consumption is mass production. If you know nothing else about economics, know THIS.
Markets do the good stuff that sounds bad. Governments do the bad stuff that sounds good.
Charles Darwin:
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Peter Drucker:
Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity. If archangels instead of businessmen sat in directors’ chairs, they would still have to be concerned with profitability, despite their total lack of personal interest in making profits.
David Friedman:
The manufacturer of widgets may spend his evenings on his knees praying for the price of widgets to go up, but he spends his days behind a desk making it go down.
Milton Friedman:
It's nice to elect the right people, but that isn't the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.
Seth Godin:
You don’t need more time …you just need to decide.
Friedrich Hayek:
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Capitalism offends intellectual pride, socialism flatters it.
Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.
Daniel Kahneman:
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.
Arnold Kling:
For-profit firms are accountable to customers. Non-profits are at best accountable to donors and at worst allow wide discretion to managers who are trend-followers.
We choose what to believe by choosing who to believe.
[a bit of a paraphrase here] Concerning systems and institutions: We can try to make them hard to break or easy to fix. We seem to err on the side of attempts at hard to break where easy to fix might make more sense.
Robin Hanson:
Masses recognize elites, who oversee experts, who pick details.
Steven Landsburg:
Most of economics can be summarized in four words: “People respond to incentives.” The rest is commentary.
But when something is easy to imagine, it’s often because you’ve failed to imagine it in sufficient detail.
If you bake a cupcake, the world has one more cupcake. If you become a circus clown, the world has one more squirt of seltzer down someone’s pants. But if you win an Olympic gold medal, the world will not have one more Olympic gold medalist. It will just have you instead of someone else.
[Economics] is all about observing the world with genuine curiosity and admitting that it is full of mysteries.
Deirdre McCloskey:
The much-maligned “capitalism” has raised the real income per person of the poorest since 1800 not by 10 percent or 100 percent, but by over 3,000 percent.
Commerce works better than theft.
Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.
H.L. Mencken:
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
Ludwig von Mises:
The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier.
Michael Munger:
Every flaw in consumers is worse in voters.
Matt Ridley:
Innovation is the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity.
Derek Sivers:
If you feel anything less than “hell yeah!” about something, say no. We say yes too often. By saying no to almost everything, you leave space and time in your life to throw yourself completely into the few things that matter most.
Adam Smith:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
Thomas Sowell:
…And then what?
Reality isn’t optional.
There are no solutions—only tradeoffs.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Alex Tabarrok:
Trust literatures not papers.
A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
John Tierney:
Recycling is the theory that everything has value except your time.