Great Throughts Treasury

"If you increase the quantity of money, you bring about the lowering of the purchasing power of the monetary unit."

"The quantity of money available in the whole economy is always sufficient to secure for everybody all that money does and can do."

"No increase in the welfare of the members of a society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money."

"There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions."

"The modern American high school, reformed according to the principles of John Dewey, has failed lamentably, as all competent experts agree, in the teaching of mathematics, physics, languages, and history."

"Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them."

"The great mass of people are incapable of realizing that in economic life nothing is permanent except change. They regard the existing state of affairs as eternal; as it has been so shall it always be."

"In all countries where inflation has been rapid, it has been observed that the decrease in the value of the money has occurred faster than the increase in its quantity."

"The supremacy of public opinion determines not only the singular role that economics occupies in the complex of thought and knowledge. It determines the whole process of human history."

"The history of mankind is the history of ideas. For it is ideas, theories, and doctrines that guide human action, determine the ultimate ends men aim at, and the choice of the means employed for the attainment of these ends."

"It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch."

"Economics is not about goods and services; it is about human choice and action."

"As society is only possible if everyone, while living his own life, at the same time helps others to live; if every individual is simultaneously means and end; if each individual's well-being is simultaneously the condition necessary to the well-being of others, it is evident that the contrast between I and thou, means and end, automatically is overcome."

"The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot."

"Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought."

"Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production."

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."

"Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's success as a means for the attainment of his own."