...I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind.

--David Ricardo

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

--Paul Johnson
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

-- T. S. ELiot
There is no safety for honest men but by believing all possible evil of evil men.

--Edmund Burke

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

-- C. S. Lewis

...mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent...

--Adam Smith

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.

--Eric Hoffer

Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?

--Jean-Baptiste Say

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

--Joseph A. Schumpeter