A Quote by Henry Hazlitt

Short-sighted and impatient efforts to wipe out poverty by severing the connection between effort and reward can only lead to the growth of a totalitarian state, and destroy the economic progress that this country has so dearly bought.

Henry Hazlitt

Quote Topics

Between Bought Connection Country Dearly Destroy Economic Economic Progress Effort Efforts Growth Impatient Lead Only Out Poverty Progress Reward Short Short-Sighted State Totalitarian Totalitarian State Wipe

Quote Author

Henry Hazlitt
American - Philosopher
November 28, 1894 - July 9, 1993

Fiscal decentralisation does not lead to higher economic growth because economic growth is much more driven by factors other than taxes and spending, e.g. increases in technological progress and improved human capital.

Lars Feld

The explosive growth in places like Shanghai has helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into a thriving new middle class. What China has done is nothing short of an economic transformation, and the citizens of this country have every right to be proud.

Gary Locke

We must understand the role of human rights as empowering of individuals and communities. By protecting these rights, we can help prevent the many conflicts based on poverty, discrimination and exclusion (social, economic and political) that continue to plague humanity and destroy decades of development efforts. The vicious circle of human rights violations that lead to conflicts-which in turn lead to more violations-must be broken. I believe we can break it only by ensuring respect for all human rights.

Mary Robinson

I always think that reforms and turning China into a free country is a long and tortuous process. Despite this, in a totalitarian state, the fight for freedom comes from the accumulative efforts of the people; without such efforts, very little will happen.

Liu Xiaobo

But, we have had the debate in our country now for a number of years as to whether or not free trade agreements are good for economic growth and economic opportunity in creating jobs and lifting people out of poverty.

Donald Evans

The road to economic well-being is to reward productive economic activity and to provide a moderate and predictable growth of money to finance real economic growth without reigniting the fires of inflation.

Paul Craig Roberts

In a free enterprise system, with an honest and stable money, there is dominantly a close link between effort and productivity, on the one hand, and economic reward on the other. Inflation severs this link. Reward comes to depend less and less on effort and production, and more and more on successful gambling and luck.

Henry Hazlitt

State interference in economic life, which calls itself economic policy, has done nothing but destroy economic life. Prohibitions and regulations have by their general obstructive tendency fostered the growth of the spirit of wastefulness.

Ludwig von Mises

Chile has done a lot to rid itself of poverty, especially extreme poverty, since the return to democracy. But we still have a ways to go toward greater equity. This country does not have a neoliberal economic model anymore. We have put in place a lot of policies that will ensure that economic growth goes hand in hand with social justice.

Michelle Bachelet

Society must cease to look upon 'progress' as something desirable. 'Eternal Progress' is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a 'steadily expanding economy', but a zero growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Putin set out to build a mafia state. He didn't set out to build a totalitarian regime. But he was building his mafia state on the ruins of a totalitarian regime. And so we end up with a mafia state and a totalitarian society.

Masha Gessen

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

John F. Kennedy

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitiousfabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance

Thomas Huxley

The laws by which the Divine Ruler of the universe has decreed an indissoluble connection between public happiness and private virtue, whatever apparent exceptions may delude our short-sighted judgments, never fail to vindicate their supremacy and immutability.

William Cabell Rives

Polak, a psychiatrist, has applied a behavioral and anthropological approach to alleviating poverty, developed by studying people in their natural surroundings. He argues that there are three mythic solutions to poverty eradication: donations, national economic growth, and big businesses. Instead, he advocates helping the poor earn money through their own efforts of developing low-cost tools that are effective and profitable.