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What’s the One Quote Everyone Should Know?
If you could pick one quote that everyone in the country had to memorize, what would it be? There’s no shortage of good ones, but what is the one concept that you wish every American understood better than they do today, and what quote gets that point across like no other? Here’s my current choice:
C. S. Lewis: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
This has always been one of my favorites, but for obvious reasons (looking at you, “Karen”) it’s especially relevant right now.
A few other suggestions:
P. J. O’Rourke: “A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.”
Benjamin Franklin: “The best way to save face is to keep the lower half shut.” (Poor Richard’s Almanack)
C. S. Lewis: “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
George Orwell: “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”
There could be a whole post of good Freidrich Hayek quotes.
“‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”
“The reasons why the adoption of a system of central planning necessarily produces a totalitarian system are fairly simple. Whoever controls the means must decide which ends they are to serve. … Totalitarianism is nothing but consistent collectivism, the ruthless execution of the principle that ‘the whole comes before the individual’ and the direction of all members of society by a single will supposed to represent the ‘whole’.”
“The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
“Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom.”
“A limited democracy might indeed be the best protector of individual liberty and be better than any other form of limited government, but an unlimited democracy is probably worse than any other form of unlimited government, because its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise.”
“It is no exaggeration to say that the central aim of socialism is to discredit those traditional morals which keep us alive.”
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
What is your one quote?
Published in General
Nick, I hope you don’t mind if I borrow some of your quotes for our retirement community newsletter. Thanks!
Thanks, Nick. The C.S. Lewis and Hayek ones have special importance right now.
Of course not. As a wise man once said…
Also Abe Lincoln, when an opponent called him two-faced: “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this one?”
I’ve found that people will buy almost anything if you put quotes around it, as if it was once said by someone wise.
Patrick Henry, Speech Before Virginia Ratifying Convention 5 June 1788:
Excellent suggestion.
I love statistics to (bit of a data scientist myself). However math is a language and had the strength and weaknesses of all languages.
Replace congress with Politician and its more accurate.
However your two C.S. Lewis Quotes are two of my favs also.
Memorize is one thing. Understand?
“You can’t save everybody, folks. Just try not to be living next to them when they go off.” – Dennis Miller
As required to be memorized via USAF Contrails, 1984.
“We didn’t all come over on the same ship, but we’re all in the same boat.”
“Men are all the same. They just have different heads so you can tell them apart.”
“Hatred is a poison that corrodes its container.”
“You can’t have a mink before you’re 40. Everyone will wonder what you did to get it.”
——My Mom Carolyn McMaster
When I saw P. J. O’Rourke in your list it reminded me of the line of his I always liked:
”Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
H. L. Mencken, “Notes on Democracy”:
The one most relevant to right now would be “In a decent health care system, the sick are quarantined; inside tyranny, everyone is.” (I’m paraphrasing and I don’t know who actually came up with this one.)
Those are brilliant.
Gotta start somewhere.
Was still there in Contrails in 1989. Still have it memorized.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son…”
That’s an interesting one. As the quote implies, the “great masses” of people can do some incredibly dumb stuff, but the thing is that it’s usually less dumb than whatever program the government will come up with regarding the same problem.
I like your first one. I forget when I first read it, but it needs internalized by so many.
Yeah, maybe memorization isn’t enough. Perhaps we should require that all HOA presidents, neighborhood watch leaders, and politicians of any stripe have it tattooed somewhere. Anyone making an unsolicited report to family services or to local police regarding a neighbor should have it tattooed somewhere sensitive.
The versions I found on the internet are not the same as we memorized.
Another Abe Lincoln: “If this is coffee, please bring me tea. If this is tea, please bring me coffee.”
RushBabe49
Your last Hayek quote was my choice. I would imagine that listeners of the EconTalk podcast are 500% more likely to choose this as their one quote to memorize.