"Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist."
"Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable."
3 likes
Source: Thomas Carlyle, A.H.R. Ball (2014). “Selections from Carlyle”, p.111, Cambridge University Press
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Thomas Carlyle
"He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything."
"Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come."
"No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence."
"Endurance is patience concentrated."
"I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom."