Quotes from Henry Hazlitt

El divagador encara un problema, pierde interés y lo abandona. El hombre capaz de concentrarse persevera hasta que lo resuelve.

Por cada dólar gastado en el puente habrá un dólar menos en el bolsillo de los contribuyentes. Si el puente cuesta un millón de dólares, los contribuyentes habrán de abonar un millón de dólares, y se encontrarán sin una cantidad que de otro modo hubiesen empleado en las cosas que más necesitaban.

La generación actual tiene el priviliegio, que no tuvo ninguna otra, de contar con ese ingente acervo intelectual.

La generación actual tiene el privilegio, que no tuvo ninguna otra, de contar con ese ingente acervo intelectual.

If you follow this method with all problems—i.e., thinking a thing out for yourself before looking up what others have thought—you will soon improve your thinking surprisingly.

No problem worthy of the name is an indivisible unit, and may always be broken into smaller problems. The whole science of aesthetics is included in the simple question What is beauty?, the science of ethics is merely the answer to What is right conduct?

Much of the success of our thinking will depend upon just how we divide our big problems into subsidiary problems, and just what our subsidiary or subordinate problems are.

Half the thinking process, as pointed out, depends on the occurrence of suggestions. The occurrence of suggestions depends on how ideas are associated in a man's mind.This depends to some extent on the education and the whole past life and environment of the individual

All method can do is to awaken the most fruitful associations of ideas already in mind. Hence the more methods we adopt—the greater the number of views we take of any problem—the more solutions will suggest themselves. There is one further reason why we should take as many different viewpoints as possible.

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man

Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty.

Government can't give us anything without depriving us of something else.

The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and ... the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.

The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.

A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.

either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light.

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves.

There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.

The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

ECONOMICS IS HAUNTED by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine—the special pleading of selfish interests.