A Quote by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Does it seem to you impossible to imagine anything more inextricable than the social contract, when you think of the frightful number of relations that it must regulate -- something like squaring the circle, or finding perpetual motion? That is the reason why, wearied of the struggle, you fall back on absolutism and force.
Related Quotes
Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.
Squaring numbers is a symmetrical process that I like very much. And when I divide one number by another, say, 13 divided by 97, I see a spiral rotating downwards in larger and larger loops that seem to warp and curve. The shapes coalesce into the right number. I never write anything down.
If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.
But we have reason to think that the annihilation of work is no less a physical impossibility than its creation, that is, than perpetual motion.
Is there anything more terrible than perpetual motion, than doing and doing and doing, without a reason, without a consciousness, without a change, without an end?
If you're on a contract at 'The New Yorker,' the contract specifies the number of words you will publish in the magazine per year. I get paid by the word, like most writers. That's one reason why the Scientology article was 25,000 words long!
Dilbert: I'm obsessed with inventing a perpetual motion machine. Most scientists think it's impossible, but I have something they don't. Dogbert: A lot of spare time? Dilbert: Exactly.
No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive force and subjugation. It has evolved without contractual foundation, just like a gang of protection racketeers. And concerning the struggle of all against all: that is a myth.
If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.
Wherefore it is impossible to succeed in comparing wealth of different eras or different nations. This, in political economy, like squaring the circle in mathematics, is impracticable, for want of a common mean or measure to go by.
I think we have to change our perspective. I don't think life stops after 50 - if anything, it gets more and more exciting. For some reason, we don't honor or pay respect to aging. It's something that we look at as a negative, and yet every single person on this planet does it. I don't understand why it's not something that's celebrated, why there's some sort of an expiration date on who you are as a person worth watching and a story being told about you. It makes absolutely no sense.
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down - we're not going to be the number one group in the world forever - so you have to have something else to fall back on.
I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down -- we're not going to be the Number One group in the world forever -- so you have to have something else to fall back on.
All solitary enjoyments, quickly fall, or become painful, so that, perhaps, no more insufferable misery can be conceived than that which must follow incommunicable privileges. Only imagine a human being condemned to perpetual youth while all around him decay and die. O, how sincerely would he call upon death for deliverance!
American history and the black experience are inextricable. And both are inextricable from policing. Far more often than not, that's been a good thing.
Related Authors
Adam Smith Quotes
Scottish
Economist
Alan Greenspan Quotes
American
Economist
Benjamin Graham Quotes
American
Economist
Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
Austrian
Economist
John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
American
Economist
John Maynard Keynes Quotes
English
Economist
Joseph Stiglitz Quotes
American
Economist
Ludwig von Mises Quotes
Austrian
Economist
Milton Friedman Quotes
American
Economist
Muhammad Yunus Quotes
Bangladeshi
Economist
Murray Rothbard Quotes
American
Economist
Paul Krugman Quotes
American
Economist
Richard Thaler Quotes
American
Economist
Robert Reich Quotes
American
Economist
Thomas Sowell Quotes
American
Economist
Walter E. Williams Quotes
American
Economist