A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.
Henry HazlittThe times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of human liberty, which means the future of civilization.
Henry HazlittWe are so accustomed to the miracle of private enterprise that we habitually take it for granted. But how does private industry solve the incredibly complex problem of turning out tens of thousands of different goods and services in the proportions in which they are wanted by the public? ... It solves these problems through the institutions of private property, competition, the free market, and the existence of money - through the interrelations of supply and demand, costs and prices, profits and losses.
Henry HazlittCompetition always tends to bring about the most economical and efficient method of production. Those who are most successful in this competition will acquire more capital to increase their production still further; those who are least successful will be forced out of the field. So capitalist production tends constantly to be drawn into the hands of the most efficient.
Henry HazlittEverything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves."
Henry HazlittThe government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn't first take from someone else.
Henry HazlittPrecisely because the State has the monopoly of coercion it can be allowed the monopoly only of coercion. Only if the modern State can be held within a strictly limited agency of duties and powers can it be prevented from regimenting, conquering, and ultimately devouring the society which gave it birth.
Henry Hazlitt