Mark A. Price, University of Utah

"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to avoid being deceived by economists."

Joan Robinson

"I ain't a Communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life."

Woody Guthrie

"It is wonderful that nobody has ever yet fancied it to be sinful to scratch where it itches, and that it has never been determined that the only natural way of scratching is with such or such a finger and that it is unnatural to scratch with any other."

Jeremy Bentham

"In a sense, the oldest and most deeply rooted philosophical idea in the
world and in our natures is Shit happens."

John Lanchester

"Blessed is he who learns how to engage in inquiry, with no impulse to harm his countrymen or to pursue wrongful actions, but perceives the order of immortal and ageless nature, how it is structured."

Euripides

"It takes only one independent and effective rational mind to change the paradigms of understanding for the rest of humankind."

Charles Freeman - The Closing of the Western Mind

"There is a reason why it's not called Laborism."

Ebru Kongar

"Something immense may now be stirring, but to meet it we will do better to expect that life will not provide the answers we need so much as it will offer the privilege of improving our questions"

Norman Mailer on Sartre's God Problem

"Freedom is just another word for having nothing left to sell."

Billy Bragg

In 1972 Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were discussing options for escalating the war in Vietnam. Kissinger's description of some of the options for escalating the war elicited the following exchange.

Nixon - "I'd rather use the nuclear bomb."
Kissinger - "That, I think, would just be too much."
Nixon - "The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you?"
Nixon - "I just want you to think big."

"Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party - however numerous they may be--is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of 'justice' but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when 'freedom' becomes a special privilege."

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstance chosen by themselves, but under circumstance directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."

"Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naive psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert."

"Some years ago it dawned on me that what's called class warfare in this country goes in only one direction-up. You are engaging in class warfare if you point out what sort of people would benefit from a repeal of the estate tax... If you criticize welfare mothers for irresponsibility and laziness and immorality, on the other hand, you are simply trying to uphold the American virtues of thrift and ambition."

"Every progressive social movement must, sooner or later, confront the powerful tendency of capitalism to cripple our capacities, stunt our dreams, and incorporate our politics."

"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

"It was enough for them (who made the constitution) to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and has cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago."