J.M. August Quotes

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people

Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are.

The height of artistic skill is to know how to conceal the mechanical effort and strain beneath harmonious calm.

By the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached.

Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.

What people call success is only preparation for the next failure.

The beautiful always retains the freshness of novelty, while the astonishing soon grow tiresome.

The most important thing for me is the direct observation of nature in its light-filled existence.

And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?

We must raise and train an army of fighters for freedom.

The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs.

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.

I do not care about my own appearance, but I would hope that people could see into my soul, and that is presented better in these photographs than in others. (On his self-portraits)

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.

We can either have a free Parliament or a free people. Personal freedom requires that all authority is restrained by long-run principles which the opinion of the people approves.

A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.

Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.

Muscles do not use oxygen at a constant rate.

I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the other side of love.

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them, good or bad.

I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.

Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law.

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

By sight and observation and thought, with the help of the camera, and the addition of the date of the year, we can hold fast the history of the world.

It is a fine art because it strives for an ideal, not only in plastic but also in lyrical respect.

There comes a moment... When imagination gives out and Reality leaps forth. It is frightful!

Necessity knows no rules.

When I free my body from its clothes, from all their buttons, belts, and laces, it seems to me that my soul takes a deeper, freer breath.

The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.

Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.

Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.

It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.

It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.

I will listen to any hypothesis but on one condition-that you show me a method by which it can be tested.

I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival.

I knew from experience of the past that this butchering of people was done for the express purpose of defeating the eight-hour movement.

A radical is one who speaks the truth.

With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.

There is only one '' principle that can preserve a free society: namely, the strict prevention of all coercion except in the enforcement of general abstract rules equally applicable to all.

Therefore, let me in honesty speak the truth about our epoch and people.

In man, the mechanical breathing is essential to life, and it is one of the old tests for death to see whether these movements have ceased completely.

Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn for ever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peak.

The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.

I don't write for a particular audience.

Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.

Life don't owe you nothing.

Capitalism created the possibility of employment.