22 quotes
Nothing can be in the long run or on a large scale sound economics which is not sound ethics.
Equality (1897)
The golden rule in its social application is as truly the secret of plenty as of peace.
Equality (1897)
You see economic science in your day was a science of things; in our day it is a science of human beings.
Equality (1897)
Power over others is necessarily demoralizing to the master and degrading to the subject.
Equality (1897)
If you own the things men must have, you own the men who must have them.
Equality (1897)
The profit system, by its necessary nature, operated to stop limit and cripple production at the point where it began to be efficient.
Equality (1897)
The old so-called ethics of property absolutely overlooked the whole ethical side of the subject--namely, its bearing on human relations.
Equality (1897)
Though the state will enforce no private contracts of any sort, it does not forbid them.
Equality (1897)
Our economic system puts us in a position where we can follow Christ's maxim, so impossible for you, to 'take no thought for the morrow.'
Equality (1897)
The whole acknowledged art of wealth-making on a large scale consisted in devices for getting possession of other people's product without too open breach of the law.
Equality (1897)
Government is actually now what it nominally was in the America of your day--the servant, tool, and instrument by which the people give effect to their will, itself being without will.
Equality (1897)
As to the pretension of civilized persons to admire gems or gold for their intrinsic beauty apart from their value, I suspect that was a more or less unconscious sham.
Equality (1897)
The principle of inheritance, the backbone of the whole property system, at the first challenge of serious criticism abandoned all ethical defense and shriveled into a mere convention established by law.
Equality (1897)
The Revolution, that is to say, instead of denying or abolishing the institution of private property, affirmed it in an incomparably more positive, beneficial, permanent, and general form than had ever been known before.
Equality (1897)
Their maxim that demand governed supply, and supply would always meet demand, referred in no way to the demand representing human need, but wholly to an artificial thing called the market, itself the product of the profit system.
Equality (1897)
Truly, it is these secondary consequences, these moral and social reactions of economic equality to create a noble atmosphere of human intercourse, that, after all, have been the greatest contribution which the principle has made to human happiness.
Equality (1897)
The theory that a person has a right in dealing with his fellows to take advantage of his superior abilities is nothing other than a slightly more roundabout expression of the doctrine that might is right.
Equality (1897)
Under competition there was no free play whatever allowed for the capitalist's better feelings even if he had any. He could not be better than the system. If he tried to be, the system would crush him.
Equality (1897)
A vast army of laborers was constantly engaged in manufacturing an infinite variety of articles and appliances of elegance and ostentation which mocked the unsatisfied primary necessities of those who toiled to produce them.
Equality (1897)
No inventor could introduce an invention, however excellent, unless he could get capitalists to take it up, and this usually they would not do unless the inventor relinquished to them most of his hopes of profit from the discovery.
Equality (1897)