People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.
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In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves:
the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of read more
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves:
the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
We believe at once in evil, we only believe in good upon reflection. Is this not sad?.
We believe at once in evil, we only believe in good upon reflection. Is this not sad?.
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but read more
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human read more
The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims.
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it read more
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.
The theory of evolution must be considered as a scientific theory, as theory, that is, proposed to explain or systemize read more
The theory of evolution must be considered as a scientific theory, as theory, that is, proposed to explain or systemize a set of facts, and that no one has any claim to be considered as a serious rival to Darwin in the "discovery" of this theory who did not conduct his evolutionary studies upon a reasonably wide basis of facts. To have ideas, apercus, is not enough, and it is the overevalutation of such clever but uncontrolled guesses which is apt to produce the ludicrous fallacy of combination, in which fragments of the final theory are collected from widely scattered sources and are combined in such a way as to impugn the originality of him who was the first to see how such a synthesis was possible.
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
Science is facts. Just as houses are made of stones, so science is made of facts. But a pile of read more
Science is facts. Just as houses are made of stones, so science is made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
