52 Quotes by Isabel Paterson

Production is profit; and profit is production. They are not merely related; they are the same thing. When a man plants potatoes, if he does not get back more than he put in, he has produced nothing.

Fear and want are subjective; and poverty is the absence of wealth. If it were promised that from the hour of his birth no man should ever again stand in his naked skin, who is to produce the clothes? who is to have such absolute power over every person? The only condition in which no one can experience poverty, want, or fear, is that of rigor mortis. The dead neither want nor fear.

Not uncommonly one hears some romantic young woman say, ‘Oh, I would give anything to be a writer.’ But she would not; and ‘anything’ is not enough. One must give everything.

Another “advanced” educational method does not mark examination papers for their accuracy; instead, grades are given indicating that the child has done well in relation to his capacities. That is, the teacher assumes divine omniscience, and pretends to know the child’s innate capacities absolutely, by some supernal means, instead of judging the specific result of a specific examination.

It takes the best part of a lifetime to find out what you don’t want.

People mostly do as they like, and that would be fine if they’d let other people do the same.

If Charles F. Kettering or Thomas Alva Edison or Henry Ford had been put to work digging ditches under duress, one could calculate approximately how much energy or work could have been got out of them. Left to their own devices, as they were, it is impossible to say how much energy they actually released into production.