Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained.
John Stuart Mill
The economic role of the state has managed to hold the attention of scholars for over two centuries without arousing their curiosity.
George Stigler
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
I told the boss, "You think business is mathematics. It’s not math, it’s chemistry."
Arnie Weissmann (paraphrased)
The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.
Milton Friedman
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
Winston Churchill
Hayek’s work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project.
Jimmy Wales
We make our tools, and then they shape us.
Kenneth Boulding
No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real.
Peter Drucker
Every great idea contains the seed of its own destruction.
(I cannot find a source for this quote from Mr. Smith’s high school history class; I believe it was a British Historian.)
It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it.
Niccolo Machiavelli
