Skip to content

The state is or can be master of money, but in a free society it is master of very little else.

— William Beveridge Voluntary Action (1948)

Another quote →

Topics

Money

More quotes by William Beveridge

The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man.

Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942)

A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.

Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942)

Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.

Full Employment in a Free Society (1944)

The trouble in modern democracy is that men do not approach to leadership 'til they have lost the desire to lead anyone.

Any proposals for the future, while they should use to the full the experience gathered in the past, should not be restricted by consideration of sectional interests established in the obtaining of that experience.

Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942)

All William Beveridge quotes →

You may also like

Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Beveridge (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.