The Sovereign Individual by Davidson and Rees-Mogg - Quotations

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. 1997.


Frederick C. Lane
… one of the most distinctive characteristics of governments is their attempt to create law and order by using force themselves and by controlling through various means the use of force by others.

Chinese Proverb
Of all the thirty-six ways to get out of trouble, the best way is – leave.

Alan Greenspan
The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

Christopher Lasch
Ambitious people understand, then, that a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead.

Crisis Investing by Douglas Casey - Quotations

Crisis Investing for the Rest of the '90s. Douglas Casey. 1995. ISBN 978-0806516127

Lord Byron
Ready money is Aladdin's Lamp.

Jean-Francois Revel
Authoritarian socialism has failed almost everywhere, but you will not find a single Marxist who will say it has failed because it was wrong or impractical. He will say it has failed because nobody went far enough with it. So failure never proves a myth is wrong.

Paul Samuelson (Nobel laureate, in 1989)
The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.

Mark Skousen
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state is a complete failure of civilization, while a totally voluntary society is its ultimate success.

Against the Odds - Quotations

Against the Odds: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Peter L. Bernstein. 1998. ISBN 978-0471295631

Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

John Maynard Keynes
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

Amos Tversky
Probably the most significant and pervasive characteristic of the human pleasure machine is that people are much more sensitive to negative than to positive stimuli ... think about how well you feel today, and then try to imagine how much better you could feel ... there are a few things that would make you feel better, but the number of things that would make you feel worse is unbounded.

Amos Tversky
The major driving force is loss aversion. It is not so much that people hate uncertainty – but rather, they hate losing.