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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

...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.