Great Throughts Treasury

"Never be afraid of throwing away what you have; if you can throw it away, it is not really yours."

"Granted, I should love my neighbor as myself, the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale organization, remain for solution are, ''Who precisely is my neighbor?'' and ''How exactly am I to make my love for them effective in practice?''... It had insisted that all men were brethren. But it did not occur to it to point out that, as a result of the new economic imperialism, which was begging to develop in the 17th century, the brethren of the English merchant were the Africans whom he kidnapped for slavery in America, or the American Indians from whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen whom he bought muslin's and silks at starvation prices. Religion had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral principles by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transaction of economic life no moral principles exist."

"[It is necessary to assign]... to economic activity itself its proper place as servant, not a master, of society. The burden of our civilisation is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is sill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, industrialised communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired."

"If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them.... A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success."

"Clever men are impressed in their differences from their fellows. Wise men are conscious of their resemblance to them."

"If a man has important work, and enough leisure and income to enable him to do it properly, he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of the children of Adam."

"A society which values equality will attach a high degree of significance to differences of character and intelligence between different individuals, and a low degree of significance to economic and social differences between different groups. It will endeavor, in shaping its policy and organization, to encourage the former and to neutralize and suppress the latter, and will regard it as vulgar and childish to emphasize them when, unfortunately, they still exist."

"An organized money market has many advantages. But it is not a school of social ethics or political responsibility."

"The certainties of one age are the problems of the next."

"Capitalism means the direction of industry by the owners of capital for their own pecuniary gain."

"The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual independence which nerves the individual to stand alone against the powers of this world."

"The theological mold which shaped political theory from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century is broken"

"What matters is the kind of life which people lead and the satisfaction they find in it. And here, I suspect, most of us think too much of problems and too little of persons."

"Mankind does not reflect upon questions of economic and social organization until compelled to do so by the sharp pressure of some practical emergency."

"The exploitation of the weak by the powerful, organized for the purposes of economic gain, buttressed by imposing systems of law, and screened by decorous draperies of virtuous sentiment and resounding rhetoric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most communities that the world has yet seen."

"A society which aimed at making the acquisition of wealth contingent upon the discharge of social obligations, which sought to proportion remuneration to service and denied it to those by whom no service was performed, which inquired first not what men possess but what they can make or create or achieve, might be called a Functional Society, because in such a society the main subject of social emphasis would be the performance of functions. But such a society does not exist, even as a remote ideal, in the modern world."

"A State which, in the name of peace, should make the concerted cessation of work a legal offence would be guilty of a... betrayal of freedom. It would be solving the conflict of rights between those who own and those who work by abolishing the rights of those who work."

"A right should not be absolute for the same reason that a power should not be absolute."

"A society is rich when material goods, including capital, are cheap, and human beings dear: indeed the word "riches" has no other meaning."

"An Acquisitive Society reverences the possession of wealth, as a Functional Society would honor, even in the person of the humblest and most laborious craftsman, the arts of creation."

"A hundred years ago the trade of teaching, which to-day is on the whole an honorable public service, was rather a vulgar speculation upon public credulity... It is conceivable... that some branches of medicine might have developed on the lines of industrial capitalism, with hospitals as factories, doctors hired at competitive wages as their "hands," large dividends paid to shareholders by catering for the rich, and the poor, who do not offer a profitable market, supplied with an inferior service or with no service at all."

"A balance of power... whether in international politics or in industry, is unstable, because it reposes not on the common recognition of a principle by which... nations and individuals are limited, but on an attempt to find an equipoise... without adjuring the assertion of unlimited claims. Thus... on this plane, there is no solution."

"All the time the principles upon which industry should be based are simple, however difficult it may be to apply them; and if they are overlooked it isnot because they are difficult, but because they are elementary. They are simple because industry is simple."

"All rights... are conditional and derivative, because all power should be conditional and derivative. They are derived from the end or purpose of the society in which they exist."

"An erring colleague is not an Amalkite to be smitten hip and thigh."

"As long as a minority has so large an income that part of it, if spent at all, must be spent on trivialities, so long will part of the human energy and mechanical equipment of the nation be diverted from serious work, which enriches it, to making trivialities, which impoverishes it."

"An industry, when all is said, is, in its essence, nothing more mysterious than a body of men associated, in various degrees of competition and co-operation, to win their living by providing the community with some service which it requires... its function is service, its method is association."

"As long as the private ownership of industrial capital remains, the object of reformers should be to attenuate its influence by insisting that it shall be paid not more than a rate of interest fixed in advance, and that it should carry with it no right of control."

"Because its function is service, an industry as a whole has rights and duties towards the community, the abrogation of which involves privilege. Because its method is association, the different parties within it have rights and duties towards each other; and the neglect or perversion of these involves oppression."

"Before the rise of capitalist agriculture and capitalist industry, the ownership, or at any rate the secure and effective occupation, of land and tools by those who used them, was a condition precedent to effective work in the field or in the workshop... The interference... involved the sacrifice of those who carried on useful labor to those who did not. To resist... was to protect not only property but industry, which was indissolubly connected with it."

"By fixing men's minds, not upon the discharge of social obligations, which restricts their energy, because it defines the goal to which it should be directed, but upon the exercise of the right to pursue their own self-interest, it offers unlimited scope for the acquisition of riches... To the strong it promises unfettered freedom... to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize... the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there are no ends other than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit... Thus it makes the individual the center of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediences. And it... relieves... the necessity of discriminating between... enterprise and avarice, energy and unscrupulous greed, property which is legitimate and property which is theft, the just enjoyment of the fruits of labor and the idle parasitism of birth or fortune... and suggests that excess or defect, waste or superfluity, require no conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces."

"During the greater part of the nineteenth century the significance of the opposition between the two principles of individual rights and social functions was masked by the doctrine of the inevitable harmony between private interests and public good. Competition, it was argued, was an effective substitute for honesty. Today... few now would profess adherence to the compound of economic optimism and moral bankruptcy which led a nineteenth century economist to say: "Greed is held in check by greed, and the desire for gain sets limits to itself.""

"Before the rise of a commercial civilization, it was the mark of statesmanship... to cherish the small property-owner even to the point of offending the great... Popular sentiment idealized the yeoman?"the Joseph of the country who keeps the poor from starving"... [and] cursed the usurer who took advantage of his neighbor's necessities to live without labor."

"Capital is not to employ labor. Labor, which includes managerial labor, is to employ capital; and to employ it at the cheapest rate at which, in the circumstances of the trade, it can be got."

"Economic egotism is still worshipped... economic rights remain, whether economic functions are performed or not."

"English practical men... had scanty sympathy with the absolute affirmations of France. Adam Smith and his precursors... showed how the mechanism of economic life converted "as with an invisible hand," the exercise of individual rights into the instrument of public good. Bentham, who... thought the Declaration of the Rights of Man as absurd as any other dogmatic religion, completed the new orientation by supplying... the principle of Utility."

"Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow."

"Functionless property is the greatest enemy of legitimate property itself. It is the parasite which kills the organism that produced it... It values neither culture nor beauty, but only the power which belongs to wealth and the ostentation which is the symbol of it."

"If by "Property" is meant the personal possessions which the word suggests to nine-tenths of the population, the object of socialists is not to undermine property but to protect and increase it."

"Had the movement against the control of production by property taken place before the rise of limited companies, in which ownership is separated from management, the transition to the organization of industry as a profession might also have taken place, as the employers and workmen in the building trade propose that it should, by limiting the rights of private ownership without abolishing it."

"From the point of view of social health and economic efficiency, society should obtain its material equipment at the cheapest price possible, and after providing for depreciation and expansion should distribute the whole product to its working members and their dependents. What happens at present, however, is that its workers are hired at the cheapest price which the market (as modified by organization) allows, and that the surplus, somewhat diminished by taxation, is distributed to the owners of property."

"If industry is to be organized as a profession, two changes are requisite, one negative and one positive. The first is that it should cease to be conducted by the agents of property-owners for the advantage of property-owners, and should be carried on, instead, for the service of the public. The second is that, subject to rigorous public supervision, the responsibility for the maintenance of the service should rest upon the shoulders of those, from organizer and scientist to laborer, by whom, in effect, the work is conducted."

"If it [a nation] is to make a decision which will wear, it must travel beyond the philosophy momentarily in favor with the proprietors of its newspapers."

"If society is to be healthy, men must regard themselves not as the owners of rights, but as trustees for the discharge of functions and the instruments of a social purpose."

"If men have no common goal it is no wonder that they should fall out by the way, nor are they likely to be reconciled by a redistribution of their provisions."

"In [parts of] the United States... the population of peasant proprietors and small masters of the early nineteenth century were replaced in three generations by a propertyless proletariat and a capitalist plutocracy."

"In modern industrial societies the great mass of property consists, as the annual review of wealth passing at death reveals, neither of personal acquisitions such as household furniture, nor of the owner's stock-in-trade, but of rights of various kinds, such as royalties, ground-rents, and, above all, of course shares in industrial undertakings which yield an income irrespective of any personal service rendered by their owners."

"In all societies which have accepted industrialism there is an upper layer which claims the enjoyment of social life, while it repudiates its responsibilities... and a whole world of rising bourgeoisie eager to imitate them... The second consequence is the degradation of those who labor, but who do not... command large rewards; that is, of the great majority of mankind."

"If to-day the miner or any other workman produces more, he has no guarantee that the result will be lower prices rather than higher dividends and larger royalties, any more than, as a workman, he can determine the quality of the wares which his employer supplies to customers, or the price at which they are sold. Nor, as long as he is directly the servant of a profit-making company, and only indirectly the servant of the community, can any such guarantee be offered him."

"If they are doctors... there are certain kinds of conduct which cannot be practiced, however large the fee... because they are unprofessional; if scholars and teachers, that it is wrong to make money by deliberately deceiving the public, as is done by makers of patent medicines, however much the public may clamor to be deceived; if judges or public servants, that they must not increase their incomes by selling justice for money; if soldiers, that the service comes first, and their private inclinations, even the reasonable preference of life to death, second."