This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Professional competence, political independence, and moral sensitivity would be required qualities of the guardian of moral discipline.
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
Individual | Justice | Mankind |
Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell
Force, always a tragedy for both user and the one upon which it is used, has become less and less effective in deciding political matters.
Tragedy |
John L. Lewis, fully John Llewellyn Lewis
The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves.
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
The ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission] illustrates what might be called the natural history of government intervention. A real or fancied evil leads to demands to do something about it. A political coalition forms consisting of sincere, high-minded reformers and equally sincere interested parties. The incompatible objectives of the members of the coalition (e.g., low prices to consumers and high prices to producers) are glossed over by fine rhetoric about “the public interest,” “fair competition,” and the like. The coalition succeeds in getting Congress (or a state legislature) to pass a law. The preamble to the law pays lip service to the rhetoric and the body of the law grants power to government officials to “do something.” The high-minded reformers experience a glow of triumph and turn their attention to new causes. The interested parties go to work to make sure that the power is used for their benefit. They generally succeed. Success breeds its problems, which are met by broadening the scope of intervention. Bureaucracy takes its toll so that even the initial special interests no longer benefit. In the end the effects are precisely the opposite of the objectives of the reformers and generally do not even achieve the objectives of the special interests. Yet the activity is so firmly established and so many vested interests are connected with it that repeal of the initial legislation is nearly inconceivable. Instead, new government legislation is called for to cope with the problems produced by the earlier legislation and a new cycle begins.
Attention | Body | Commerce | Evil | Experience | Government | History | Law | Objectives | Power | Problems | Public | Rhetoric | Service | Success | Work | Government | Commerce |
John L. Lewis, fully John Llewellyn Lewis
The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves.
Joost Meerloo. fully Joost Abraham Maurits Meerlo
He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition. This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses.
Dissent | Opportunity | Words |
John L. Lewis, fully John Llewellyn Lewis
No tin-hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or bibble-babbling mob of blackguarding and corporation paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of labor, or divert its purpose to play its natural and rational part in the development of the economic, political and social life of our nation.
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed.
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?
Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political - legislative and administrative - decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.
We must be part not only of the human community, but of the whole community; we must acknowledge some sort of oneness not only with our neighbors, our countrymen and our civilization but also some respect for the natural as well as for the man-made community. Ours is not only 'one world' in the sense usually implied by that term. It is also 'one earth'. Without some acknowledgement of that fact, men can no more live successfully than they can if they refuse to admit the political and economic interdependency of the various sections of the civilized world. It is not a sentimental but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Consciousness | Indispensable | Life | Life | Men | Society | Society |
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But… the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder… This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes.
Junius, psyeudonym of unknown English Political Writer NULL
It is an eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that “where one member suffers, all the members suffer with it."