Albert J. Nock Quotes
The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.
The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.
Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.
As a general principle, I should put it that a man's country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.
There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.
The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests...
As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime.
I have often wondered why the sounds of the beating drums do not make the marching soldiers shoot their officers and go home.
For the majority of people liberty means only the system and the administrators they are used to.
The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.
Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.
When a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the State about it.
The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government they can use.
When politicians say "I'm in politics," it may or may not be possible to trust them, but when they say, "I'm in public service," you know you should flee.
Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.
Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.
The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.
Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.
Someone asked me years ago if it were true that I disliked Jews, and I replied that it was certainly true, not at all because they are Jews, but because they are folks, and I don’t like folks.
The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.
The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit.
Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to escape it than most people make to get it.
When we speak freely, let us speak plainly, for plain speech is wholesome; especially, plain speech about public affairs and public men.
Money does not pay for anything, never has, never will. It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services.
The glossary of politics is so full of euphemistic words and phrases - as in the nature of things it must be - that one would suppose politicians must sometimes strain their wits to coin them.
As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.
Driving jobholders out of office is like the old discredited policy of driving prostitutes out of town. Their places are immediately taken by others who are precisely like them.
It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services.
