An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.

Industry entirely left to itself, would soon fall to ruin, and a nation letting everything alone would commit suicide.

The concentration and reciprocal effect of industry and agriculture conjoin in a growth of productive powers, which increases more in geometrical than in arithmetical proportion.

An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.

Only now did I recognize the reciprocal relationship which exists between manufacturing power and the national system of transportation, and that the one can never develop to its fullest without the other.

But the general welfare must restrict and regulate the exertions of the individuals, as the individuals must derive a supply of their strength from social power.

The relationship I have to my fatherland is like that of mothers with crippled children: they love them all the more, the more crippled they are. Germany is the background of all my plans, the return to Germany.