Will Hazlitt Quotes
We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.
Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart.
The fear of approaching death, which in youth we imagine must cause inquietude to the aged, is very seldom the source of much uneasiness.
We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage.
A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
Prolonged inflation never 'stimulates' the economy. On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.
Modern capitalism benefited the masses in a double way - both by greatly increasing the wages of the masses of workers and greatly reducing the real prices they had to pay for what was produced.
Libertarians are learning to their sorrow that big businessmen cannot necessarily be relied upon to be their allies in the battle against extension of governmental encroachments.
A hundred welfare programs, spending more and more billions, lead to chronic budget deficits, which lead to increased paper-money issues, which lead to higher prices.
Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.
Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.
The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot.
Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.
Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.
Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman; elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman; dignity is proper to noblemen; and majesty to kings.
It is a false principle that because we are entirely occupied with ourselves, we must equally occupy the thoughts of others. The contrary inference is the fair one.
Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.
We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.
The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.
I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.
To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.
Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.
The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.