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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The objection to profit is as if a bystander, observing the planter digging his crop, should say: “You put in only one potato and you are taking out a dozen. You must have taken them away from someone else; those extra potatoes cannot be yours by right.” If profit is denounced, it must be assumed that running at a loss is admirable. On the contrary, that is what requires justification. Profit is self-justifying.

The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse or omission.