Isabel Paterson Quotations

No law can give power to private persons; every law transfers power from private persons to government.

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

As freak legislation, the antitrust laws stand alone. Nobody knows what it is they forbid.

Money is indispensable to a long-circuit heavy load energy system. It must be used when a sufficient surplus is being produced to allow a margin for exchange, and cost of transport, over a considerable distance. Money represents a storage battery when idle, and a generalized mode of the conversion of energy when it is in motion, with a function of equating time and space.

The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race.

An army is a diversion of energy from the productive life of a nation.

The great truth is that women actually like men, and men can never believe it.

If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.

Not uncommonly one hears some romantic young woman say, 'Oh, I would give anything to be a writer.' But she would not; and 'anything' is not enough. One must give everything.

If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress.

Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. He has had the benefit of every heroic and intellectual effort men have made for many thousands of years, realized at last. If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.

One genius is about all a house will hold.

The craving for power is in itself a sign of inferior abilities and unfitness for responsibility.

Leadership is obliged to justify itself daily.

Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.

Right now it is a terrible thing to be a rugged individualist; but we don't know what else to be except a feeble nonentity.

It takes the best part of a lifetime to find out what you don't want.

As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.

The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God. But he is confronted by two awkward facts; first, that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people positively do not want to be "done good" by the humanitarian. Of course, what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.

People mostly do as they like, and that would be fine if they'd let other people do the same.

Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure.

What kind of world does the humanitarian contemplate as affording him full scope? It could only be a world filled with breadlines and hospitals, in which nobody retained the natural power of a human being to help himself or to resist having things done to him. And that is precisely the world that the humanitarian arranges when he gets his way.

The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.

If there were just one gift you could choose, but nothing barred, what would it be? We wish you then your own wish; you name it. Ours is liberty, now and forever.

Now the sole remedy for the abuse of political power is to limit it; but when politics corrupt business, modern reformers invariably demand the enlargement of the political power.

But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism.

Freedom is dangerous. Possibly crawling on all fours might be safer than standing upright, but we like the view better up there.

An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea.

The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people.

If you hear some bad collectivistic notions, chances are that they came from [modern] liberals. But if you hear or read something outrageously, god-awfully collectivistic, you may be sure that the author is a conservative.

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.

The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others.

The biggest pests are the people who use altruism as an alibi. What they passionately wish is to make themselves important.

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.

Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?

Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.