Quotable Quotes

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  —P. J. O’ROURKE

  Parliament of Whores

  Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.

  —FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT

  Government can’t give us anything without depriving us of something else.

  —HENRY HAZLITT

  in The Freeman

  Everybody wants to eat at the government’s table, but nobody wants to do the dishes.

  —WERNER FINCK

  When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves.

  —GEORGE PATAKI

  The mistakes made by Congress wouldn’t be so bad if the next Congress didn’t keep trying to correct them.

  —CULLEN HIGHTOWER

  Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

  —MONTESQUIEU

  Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

  —EDMUND BURKE

  You are better off not knowing how sausages and laws are made.

  —Washington, D.C., adage

  A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

  —PRIMO LEVI

  Survival In Auschwitz

  Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  A government is the only vessel known to leak from the top.

  —JAMES RESTON

  in The New York Times

  Knowing exactly how much of the future can be introduced into the present is the secret of a great government.

  —VICTOR HUGO

  It’s every American’s duty to support his government, but not necessarily in the style to which it has become accustomed.

  —Quoted by Thomas Clifford

  The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

  —WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

  Windfall: The End of the Affair

  We should know everything we can about government — and the first thing we should know is what we’re paying for it.

  —ROBERT FULFORD

  Financial Times

  Government investigations have always contributed more to our amusement than they have to our knowledge.

  —WILL ROGERS

  It’s one thing to call a spade a spade, but I wish my local social security office hadn’t called the maternity benefit a lump sum.

  —JOHN WATTS

  There’s nothing wrong with waiting for your ship to come in, but you can be sure that if it ever does, the Receiver of Revenue will be right there to help you unload it.

  —DAVID BIGGS

  Cape Town Argus (South Africa)

  What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

  —MARK TWAIN

  Tax reform is taking the taxes off things that have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven’t been taxed before.

  —ART BUCHWALD

  The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect.

  —SAM EWING

  FINANCE IS THE ART . . .

  Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears.

  —ROBERT W. SARNOFF

  Money still talks, but it has to catch its breath more often.

  —Parts Pups

  Money talks—but credit has an echo.

  —BOB THAVES

  A big disappointment in life is the discovery that the man who writes the finance company ads isn’t the one who makes the loans.

  —The London Free Press (Ontario)

  Time was when the average person could pay as he goes. Nowadays he has to pay as he comes and goes.

  —O. A. BATTISTA

  An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen.

  —EARL WILSON

  Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

  —JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

  The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.

  —JEAN-PAUL KAUFFMANN

  An economist’s guess is liable to be just as good as anybody else’s.

  —WILL ROGERS

  Isn’t it strange? The same people who laugh at Gypsy fortunetellers take economists seriously.

  —The Cincinnati Enquirer

  The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

  —EZRA SOLOMON

  We have become, to some extent, economic hypochondriacs. You get a wiggle in a statistic, and everyone runs to get the thermometer.

  —PAUL W. MCCRACKEN

  Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.

  —GREGG EASTERBROOK

  in The New Republic

  Although he may not always recognize his bondage, modern man lives under a tyranny of numbers.

  —NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

  The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule

  It is not the employer who pays—he only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages.

  —HENRY FORD

  It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

  —BILL VAUGHAN

  To view poverty simply as an economic condition, to be measured by statistics, is simplistic, misleading and false; poverty is a state of mind, a matter of horizons.

  —PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

  Right from the Beginning

  When economics gets important enough, it becomes political.

  —PETER G. PETERSON

  Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.

  —PAUL BRODEUR

  Outrageous Misconduct

  When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.

  —FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT

  There are so many men who can figure costs, and so few who can measure values.

  —Tribune (San Marino, California)

  Only a fool thinks price and value are the same.

  —ANTONIO MACHADO

  The best cure for the national economy would be economy.

  —ASHLEY COOPER

  in News and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina)

  People want economy, and they will pay any price to get it.

  —LEE IACOCCA

  The shortest recorded period of time lies between the minute you put some money away for a rainy day and the unexpected arrival of rain.

  —JANE BRYANT QUINN

  One thing I could never abide was the leaving of money to lie idle, or even to have credit and not use it.

  —LORD THOMSON OF FLEET

  After I Was Sixty

  Measure wealth not by the things you have, but by the things you have for which you would not take money.

  —ANONYMOUS

  Money changes people just as often as it changes hands.

  —AL BATT

  The most efficient labor-saving device is still money.

  —FRANKLIN P. JONES

  Money does make all the difference. If you have two jobs and you’re rich, you have diversified interests. If you have two jobs and you’re poor, you’re moonlighting.

  —Changing Times

  Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

  —WOODY ALLEN

  A rand goe
s a long way these days. You can carry it around for days without finding a thing it will buy.

  —Daily Dispatch

  (East London, South Africa)

  I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves.

  —JOE LOUIS

  Money is a good servant but a bad master.

  —FRENCH PROVERB

  The beauty of having a low income is that there is not enough money to buy what you don’t really need.

  —RAY INMAN

  There is nothing so habit-forming as money.

  —DON MARQUIS

  When a man says money can do anything, that settles it; he hasn’t any.

  —ED HOWE

  Bankruptcy stared me in the face, but one thought kept me calm; soon I’d be too poor to need an anti-theft alarm.

  —GINA ROTHFELS

  TO LIVE IN SOCIETY . . .

  To live in society doesn’t mean simply living side by side with others in a more or less close cohesion; it means living through one another and for one another.

  —PAUL-EUGENE ROY

  Civilization is a process whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, and then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.

  —The Complete Psychological Works of

  Sigmund Freud

  We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree.

  —PABLO CASALS

  A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

  —HENRIK IBSEN

  No one is rich enough to do without a neighbor.

  —HAROLD HELFER

  A school system without parents at its foundation is just like a bucket with a hole in it.

  —REV. JESSE L. JACKSON

  If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY

  Aristide Briand, French statesman and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize: “In order to have peace we must want it, and not always doubt it.”

  —MATTHIAS JAGGI

  Schweizer Jugend

  There’s just no place you can go any longer and escape the global problems, so one’s thinking must become global.

  —THEODORE ROSZAK

  In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it.

  —MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

  A Return to Love

  A nation is a body of people who have done great things together in the past and who hope to do great things together in the future.

  —F. H. UNDERHILL

  Colombo’s Little Book of Canadian Proverbs, Graffiti, Limericks and Other Vital Matters

  I look to a time when brotherhood needs no publicity, to a time when a brotherhood award would be as ridiculous as an award for getting up each morning.

  —DANIEL D. MICH

  We should see the new world order as a building constructed brick by brick and be motivated by the fact that we have only got as far as building the ground floor.

  —DOUGLAS HURD

  Daily Telegraph (London)

  I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.

  —KURT VONNEGUT

  WHOEVER DOESN’T KNOW THE PAST . . .

  Whoever doesn’t know the past must have little understanding of the present and no vision of the future.

  —JOSEPH S. RAYMOND

  History is the unfolding of miscalculation.

  —BARBARA TUCHMAN

  History doesn’t pass the dishes again.

  —LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE

  History is a vast early-warning system.

  —NORMAN COUSINS

  History is a better guide than good intentions.

  —JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK

  Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.

  —ITALIAN PROVERB

  A nation forgetful and disrespectful of its past has no future, and deserves none.

  —Daily Telegraph (London)

  Righteousness is easy in retrospect.

  —ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.

  in Newsweek

  The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

  —WILLA CATHER

  To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation.

  —ANTHONY QUAYLE

  It was the same with those old birds in Greece and Rome as it is now. The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.

  —HARRY S. TRUMAN

  I look upon the whole world as my fatherland, and every war has to me the horror of a family feud.

  —HELEN KELLER

  in New York Call

  Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

  —GEORG HEGEL

  Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  The great tragedies of history occur not when right confronts wrong but when two rights confront each other.

  —HENRY A. KISSINGER

  We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.

  —JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK

  In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.

  —JOSÉ NAROSKY

  The soldiers fight, and the kings are heroes.

  —BARBARA MECHELS

  When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.

  —AFRICAN PROVERB

  Might does not make right; it only makes history.

  —JIM FIEBIG

  In war there is no second prize for the runner-up.

  —GEN. OMAR N. BRADLEY

  As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can’t sit on it for long.

  —BORIS YELTSIN

  A peace which depends upon fear is nothing but a suppressed war.

  —HENRY VAN DYKE

  Foreign relations are like human relations. They are endless. The solution of one problem usually leads to another.

  —JAMES RESTON

  Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.

  —CHARLES DE GAULLE

  Revolutions are built on empty bellies.

  —WYNDHAM HARTLEY

  Natal Witness (South Africa)

  Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe.

  —JOHN MILTON

  I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  No one is more surprised than a revolutionary rebelled against.

  —PIERRE GAXOTTE

  Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

  —BARBARA TUCHMAN

  If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

  —GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA

  The Leopard

  It is not necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paper work, and the other is nostalgia.

  —FRANK ZAPPA
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br />   Perhaps the rediscovery of our humanity, and the potential of the human spirit which we have read about in legends of older civilizations, or in accounts of solitary mystics, or in tales of science fiction writers— perhaps this will constitute the true revolution of the future. The new frontier lies not beyond the planets but within each one of us.

  —PIERRE ELLIOT TRUDEAU

  Biodynamics

  A

  Ability

  Abstinence

  Acceptance

  of mistakes

  of truth

  Accidents

  Accomplishment

  Accountability

  Acquisition

  Action

  delay of

  goodness and

  Admiration

  self-

  Adolescence

  Adults

  children in

  Adventure

  Adversity

  Advice

  Affection

  Affliction