Hazlitt Quotes & Sayings

The more we do, the more we can do. — William Hazlitt

Persons without education certainly do not want [lack] either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction
they see their objects always near, never in the horizon. — William Hazlitt

A man will put forth greater efforts to save himself from ruin than he will merely to improve his position. — Henry Hazlitt

The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality. — William Hazlitt

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? — William Hazlitt

True friendship is self-love at second hand; where, as in a flattering mirror we may see our virtues magnified and our errors softened, and where we may fancy our opinion of ourselves confirmed by an impartial and faithful witness. — William Hazlitt

Greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself. — William Hazlitt

The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn't first take from someone else. — Henry Hazlitt

The idea that an expanding economy implies that all industries must be simultaneously expanding is a profound error. — Henry Hazlitt

Need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power. — Henry Hazlitt

For it is the very commodities selected for maximum price-fixing that the regulators most want to keep in abundant supply. But when they limit the wages and the profits of those who make these commodities, without also limiting the wages and profits of those who make luxuries or semiluxuries, they discourage the production of the price-controlled necessities while they relatively stimulate the production of less essential goods. — Henry Hazlitt

The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise, the restoration of incentives, to let loose the tremendous constructive energies of 300 million Americans. — Henry Hazlitt

A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom. — William Hazlitt

While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases. — William Hazlitt

Those who object to wit are envious of it. — William Hazlitt

By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages. — William Hazlitt

Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits. — William Hazlitt

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman is this: The one thinks everything right that is French, while the other thinks everything wrong that is not English. — William Hazlitt

Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment. — Henry Hazlitt

Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the now practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is any problem of any kind to be solved, government is the agency to step in and solve it. — Henry Hazlitt

The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard. — William Hazlitt

Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that. — William Hazlitt

It is almost possible to sum up the whole process of thinking as the occurrence of suggestions for the solution of difficulties and the testing out of those suggestions. The suggestions or suppositions are tested by observation,memory, experiment. — Henry Hazlitt

The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation. — William Hazlitt

Another way to find whether an analogy is fallacious is to see whether you can discover a counter analogy. Surely this is the most effective practice in refuting analogy in argument. — Henry Hazlitt

Horus non numero nisi serenas (I count only the sunny hours). — William Hazlitt

What is really being lent is not money, which is merely the medium of exchange, but capital. — Henry Hazlitt

Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner
and then to thinking! — William Hazlitt

It might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man. — William Hazlitt

All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like. — William Hazlitt

What men do not know about they take for granted. Knowledge furnishes problems, and the discovery of problems itself constitutes an intellectual advance. — Henry Hazlitt

Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination. — William Hazlitt

Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect. — William Hazlitt

Everywhere the means is erected into the end, and the end itself is forgotten. — Henry Hazlitt

We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a little
of Shakespear. [Oct. 16, 1814, The Champion] — William Hazlitt

He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves. — William Hazlitt

I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me — William Hazlitt

An accomplished coquette excites the passions of others, in proportion as she feels none herself. — William Hazlitt

Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects. — William Hazlitt

The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue. — William Hazlitt

Travel's greatest purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. — William Hazlitt

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect. — William Hazlitt

The dilemma is this. In the modern world knowledge has been growing so fast and so enormously, in almost every field, that the probabilities are immensely against anybody, no matter how innately clever, being able to make a contribution in any one field unless he devotes all his time to it for years. If he tries to be the Rounded Universal Man, like Leonardo da Vinci, or to take all knowledge for his province, like Francis Bacon, he is most likely to become a mere dilettante and dabbler. But if he becomes too specialized, he is apt to become narrow and lopsided, ignorant on every subject but his own, and perhaps dull and sterile even on that because he lacks perspective and vision and has missed the cross-fertilization of ideas that can come from knowing something of other subjects. — Henry Hazlitt

The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetness and cement of friendship. — William Hazlitt

In all experiments one must exercise ingenuity in finding other causes besides the one to be studied which may possibly influence a result, and in eliminating these. — Henry Hazlitt

That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste. — William Hazlitt

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity. — William Hazlitt

There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man. — William Hazlitt

To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness. — William Hazlitt

An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers. — William Hazlitt

In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason ... If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable. — William Hazlitt

Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both. — William Hazlitt

The capitalist system has lifted mankind out of mass poverty. It is this system that in the last century, in the last generation, even in the last decade, has acceleratively been changing the face of the world, and has provided the masses of mankind with amenities that even kings did not possess or imagine a few generations ago. — Henry Hazlitt

The public have neither shame or gratitude. — William Hazlitt

A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself. — William Hazlitt

The essence of poetry is will and passion. — William Hazlitt

The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil. — William Hazlitt

Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a Government tool? — William Hazlitt

We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility — William Hazlitt

The government never lends or gives anything to business that it does not take away from business. — Henry Hazlitt

The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the "new" economics, is to concentrate on the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole. — Henry Hazlitt

Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself. — William Hazlitt

But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen. — William Hazlitt

Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself. — William Hazlitt

The only real cure for poverty is production. — Henry Hazlitt

Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality. — William Hazlitt

The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant
without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others
and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings. — William Hazlitt

Once the premise is accepted that poverty is never the fault of the poor but the fault of 'society,' or of 'the capitalist system, then there is no definable limit to be set on relief, and the politicians who want to be elected or reelected will compete with each other in proposing new 'welfare' programs to fill some hitherto 'unmet need.' — Henry Hazlitt

Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship. — William Hazlitt

The old maxim ... there are three things necessary to success in life
Impudence! Impudence! Impudence! — William Hazlitt

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. — Henry Hazlitt

Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly. — William Hazlitt

It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter. — William Hazlitt

The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice. — William Hazlitt

Reflection brakes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment. — William Hazlitt

More and more people are becoming aware that government has nothing to give them without first taking it away from somebody else-or from themselves. Increased handouts to selected groups mean merely increased taxes, or increased deficits and increased inflation. — Henry Hazlitt

Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong. — William Hazlitt

The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come. — William Hazlitt

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else. — William Hazlitt

We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received. — William Hazlitt

Saving" in short, in the modern world, is only another form of spending. — Henry Hazlitt

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes. — William Hazlitt

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves. — William Hazlitt

Words are the only things that last forever; they are more durable than the eternal hills — William Hazlitt

Painters ... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds. — William Hazlitt

Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong. — William Hazlitt

Once the idea is accepted that money is something whose supply is determined simply by the printing press, it becomes impossible for the politicians in power to resist the constant demands for further inflation. — Henry Hazlitt

It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures. — William Hazlitt

Theory is the best guide for experiment - that were it not for theory and the problems and hypotheses that come out of it, we would not know the points we wanted to verify, and hence would experiment aimlessly — Henry Hazlitt

Private loans will utilize existing resources and capital far better than government loans. Government loans will waste far more capital and resources than private loans. Government loans, in short, as compared with private loans, will reduce production, not increase it. — Henry Hazlitt

The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature. — William Hazlitt

Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an appetite for one's dinner, as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by riding over Banstead Downs. — William Hazlitt

When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it. — William Hazlitt

To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it. — William Hazlitt

We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so. — William Hazlitt

If a government resorts to inflation, that is, creates money in order to cover its budget deficits or expands credit in order to stimulate business, then no power on earth, no gimmick, device, trick or even indexation can prevent its economic consequences. — Henry Hazlitt

A proud man is satisfied with his own good opinion, and does not seek to make converts to it. — William Hazlitt

The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics - mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species. — William Hazlitt

Here we shall have to say simply that all government expenditures must eventually be paid out of the proceeds of taxation; that inflation itself is merely a form, and a particularly vicious form, of taxation. — Henry Hazlitt

Any woman may act the part of a coquette successfully who has the reputation without the scruples of modesty. If a woman passes the bounds of propriety for our sakes, and throws herself unblushingly at our heads, we conclude it is either from a sudden and violent liking, or from extraordinary merit on our parts, either of which is enough to turn any man's head who has a single spark of gallantry or vanity in his composition. — William Hazlitt