R. H. Tawney Quotes

Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.

A reasonable estimate of economic organisation must allow for the fact that, unless industry is to be paralysed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely economic.

It is not till it is discovered that high individual incomes will not purchase the mass of mankind immunity from cholera, typhus, and ignorance, still less secure them the positive advantages of educational opportunity and economic security, that slowly and reluctantly, amid prophecies of moral degeneration and economic disaster, society begins to make collective provision for needs which no ordinary individual, even if he works overtime all his life, can provide himself.

As long as men are men, a poor society cannot be too poor to find a right order of life, nor a rich society too rich to have need to seek it.

...and was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of the Englishman.

One of the main truths of all education is that if the young are not always right, the old are always wrong.

If a man has important work, and enough leisure and income to enable him to do it properly, he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of the children of Adam.

Bankruptcies of governments have, on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans.

It is probable that democracy owes more to nonconformity than to any other single movement.

When men have gone so far as to talk as though their idols have come to life, it is time that someone broke them.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned ... if only to justify itself for making their life a hell.

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

The real economic cleavage is not... between employers and employed, but between all who do constructive work, from scientist to laborer, on the one hand, and all whose main interest is the preservation of existing proprietary rights upon the other, irrespective of whether they contribute to constructive work or not.

Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are in common.

Clever men are impressed in their differences from their fellows. Wise men are conscious of their resemblance to them.