.

ACCOMPLISHMENT

When I undertake a task, it takes possession of me. It absorbs my mental and physical energy and lets me have little or no time for any other business. Perhaps that is why I get so much done. To do it as well as I know how, in the shortest time, with the least mental expense, has always been my rule, and it has saved me from the anxieties of indecision and uncertainty of attack. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.180]

ADAPTABILITY

Adaptability in man is an art; in the animal it is merely a necessity. …Man, however, can visit any of the regions, and adapt himself to the climatic conditions he finds there. …This special art he has learned, how to protect himself in any clime and in any situation, is his gift and his gift only. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.25]

BOOKS

A man without books of wisdom is like a ship without a rudder. Yet, it is far beyond one man's power to keep apace with the avalanche of works put out by the presses season after season. All the student can do is to select those that will add to his knowledge and stimulate his thought, and I find now that nothing the masterpieces of the past. Indeed, living in the past in this way has always been a source of rejuvenation. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.286]

CAPITAL GOODS / SIDE-EFFECT OF LABOR-SAVING CHARACTERISTICS OF

...the creature born of superstition has an idea that, whoever created the earth, it is the only source from which food can be produced, and that the odd thing about it all is this: that the easier labour-saving machines tend to make production, the harder it becomes for labour to make a living. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.20]

CHURCHILL, WINSTON

There is this to say about his career: it is unique in the history of England. There never was a politician who found refreshment with so many strange bedfellows. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.252]

CITIZENSHIP / QUALIFICATIONS FOR

To know merely "something" of the Constitution, a "little" of the history of the country, and to be "slightly" familiar with the burning questions of the day, is no test of the political intelligence of the voter. Yet, judging from the reports of educationalists, certainly not ten percent of the people who go to universities would be able to qualify. [Man at The Crossroads, p.150]

The youth of today would have been considered an ignoramus when I was working my way in this country fifty years ago, and the youth of our time here, contrasted with the English youth, is deficient in the most elementary knowledge which should enable him to become a responsible citizen. [Man at The Crossroads, p.253]

CIVILIZATION / DECLINE OF

It is only when a culture begins to decline that sight of the purpose is lost. There may have been delays, accidents and diversions, halting now and then the progress of man; but all these must have been in the nature of lessons which reminded him that he was not keeping his face towards the goal. [Man At The Crossroads, pp.1-2]

CIVILIZATION / HISTORY OF

In histories of civilization, the authors, as a rule, present man as a social and, sometimes, as a political animal. Philosophers for thousands of years have disregarded man as an economic animal. Long before he reached a social stage, or was enmeshed in any political scheme, man was not far removed from the instinctive routine of animal existence. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.11]

There are such wide differences of opinion among anthropologists and sociologists as to the economic nature of the beginnings of peoples, that it is almost impossible for the student to arrive at anything like a clear understanding of when and how the land-tilling peasants became tribute-paying subjects or slaves of conquerors. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.40]

CIVILIZATION / HISTORY OF / SETTLEMENT

The rise of man from the stage of primitive agriculture, when he took a fixed abode, to the stage of the organization of the primitive community and the beginning of the state, marks a period of well-being in history overlooked by modern recorders. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.55]

CONFUCIUS

Many of his censures cannot be understood without a knowledge of the conditions described in the Li Ki. He said to his pupils: "Remember this, my children, oppressive government is fiercer and more feared than any tiger." [The Eleventh Commandment, p.48]

CLASSICS, THE

… classics are out of date, and well they may be, because to a thoughtful modern, a classic is a most uncomfortable work to read. The uneasy conscience of modern lawmakers is quick to discover how differently things were done in the early history of man. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.28]

COOPERATION

Cooperation can be voluntary or compulsory, and if the people of the commonwealth have their "rights" conferred on them by the State, then it must be a compulsory organization. Compulsion under such a system is vital. On the other hand, it is impossible to have a cooperative commonwealth that is not based upon natural rights, for if it is to be cooperative, there must be harmony, and harmony can only be obtained in a commonwealth when the people are free to unit, if they so desire. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.113]

CREATIVITY

Sometimes I felt my writing was at an end; that suddenly I had become old. And, yet, I was afraid, if I let down, I would lose my nerve. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.152]

CURRENCY / COINAGE, HISTORY OF

... Lycurgus [of Laconia] hit upon a political expedient for overcoming averice. "He withdrew all gold and silver money from currency and ordained the use of iron money only." ...At a stroke he solved the gold and silver questions of Laconia and put an end to bribery, corruption, and theft. For, "when this (iron) money obtained currency, many sorts of iniquity went into exile." Gangsters, boodlers, keepers of harlots, racketeers, and gamblers found no graft, spoil, or tribute in Laconia. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.60]

CURRENCY / PAPER, WITHOUT BACKING

…was ever a greater fraud exercised upon innocent people than that of paying gold certificates with a fifty-nine cent dollar? And yet, the Executive was, in all probability, quite conscious that the reduction of the gold content of the dollar was an unmitigated fraud, … [ Man at The Crossroads, p.75]

DEMOCRACY

Democracy in the purest sense of the term must have been established at the beginning, and came to an end only when the original democrats had made estates for themselves which were worth stealing. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.145]

DEMOCRACY / AND FREEDOM

A democracy without some sense of freedom for all its people is nothing more than a political masquerade. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.164]

DEMOCRACY / POLITICAL

Political democracy is at last what its severest critics said it would become in this country. It is the preserve of the unscrupulous politician. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.164]

…political democracy is a wobbly thing, and depends entirely upon the individual for the meaning that is given to it, and not upon the principles that are inherent in the idea. [Man at The Crossroads, p.168]

ECONOMICS PROFESSORS

Long before the appearance of the New Dealers that Roosevelt gathered round him, I had tested the economic intelligence of the type of academician who was afterwards collected into what was called the Brain Trust; and I had found most of them incapable of giving precise definitions of fundamental economic terms. Therefore, in dealing with George as a scholar, I intended to enlighten, if possible, the gentlemen who were taking payment for teaching their pupils political economy and who were lacking in a knowledge of the real meaning of such terms as land, labor, capital, and property. [ My Life in Two Worlds, pp.175-176]

Tell a professorial economist that the first man was the first economist, because every day of his life he had a demonstration of fundamental economics in process, and he would not know what on earth you were talking about. [Man At The Crossroads, p.91]

EDUCATION

In my travels over the land, I had met faculties and students in many institutions and had seen for myself the woeful state into which we had fallen. In the exact sciences, all was well, but in the departments that were formerly classified as the humanities, a rot had set in, and the worst of it was, few men seemed to be conscious of the grave state of affairs. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.136]

It is difficult to think of what we call education bothering the early families who were concerned in agriculture, fishing and hunting. Education, in the sense that we use the term, to my mind, always seems to imply sad deficiencies in the home. [Man At The Crossroads, p.55]

A system of education which does not explain man to man, which gives him no inkling at all of the natural rights that have been filched from him, leaving him ignorant of his relationship to the universe, and sending him forth into a congested labor market, is only a thing to be abhorred, but to be abolished as speedily as possible - before it is too late. [Man at The Crossroads, p.143]

When education was hard to get, it was prized; when it become anybody's toy, it was scorned. [Man at The Crossroads, p.251]

EDUCATION / JOHN DEWEY'S INFLUENCE ON

John Dewey had succeeded in twisting out of shape every notion of what a university should be. And now that institutions were pouring out men who had been instructed according to his ideas, it was a simple matter to estimate if any advantage had been gained. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.136.]

EDUCATION / ROBERT M. HUTCHINS' INFLUENCE ON

What was necessary to restore the old system that had served men so well? Hutchins had been collecting the materials for this explosion, and he incorporated them in a book which he called The Higher Learning in America. The storm it raised indicated clearly that its publication was necessary. The outburst from indignant "educationists" of various schools revealed to me that nothing could have been more timely than this conservative and moderate statement of the condition of affairs. There was not an ill-considered sentence in the book. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.137]

EINSTEIN, ALBERT

I do not remember ever meeting a great man who had such a delightfully boyish appreciation of broad fun. And what a rollicking, contagious laugh; but, yet, he was extremely shy and most reserved. There was something in his shyness that was almost like suspicion, and many people have mistaken his reserve for skepticism. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.141]

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

Economic pressure has been withdrawn, because there is no equality of opportunity, and economic pressure is absolutely essential if a man is to enjoy equality of opportunity to use the earth. Human rights are natural rights, but your thorough-going humanist will have none of it. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.118]

A conception of liberty that is not based on equality of opportunity is of little value to a people, and history undoubtedly shows that mere political and emotional notions of liberty do not work out in practice. [Man at The Crossroads, p.168]

ETHICS

…a man who has any principle that is worth preserving, will act conscientiously in public dealings, and in these affairs be guided by the moral attitude which he deems essential in his private life. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.176]

EVIL / CAUSE OF

Evil is the consequence of man's own folly. If he hath the power, through the development of scientific method, to war upon disease and conquer it, he hath the power, also, to conquer the problems of ignorance and poverty. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.8]

EVOLUTION

Man … has the dual capacity of gathering the fruits which Nature provides and, besides, using these fruits for the purpose of cultivating them. And with this added capacity, he also has another, which is solely his own in the animal kingdom, and that is, of selecting and preparing the soil near his habitation, and inventing and using devices for the protection of the growth of the seed. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.10]

…no matter how much things differ in degree, so far as the primary needs are concerned, man has not changed as a land animal in any particular at all. When, however, one regards the subject from a comparative point of view, modern man suffers in every particular. [Man At The Crossroads, p.61]

FABIANS / AND LIBERALS

When Liberals flirted with the theories of the Fabians and began to put forward measures that called for bureaucrats to administer them, I decided that a change had taken place which meant no good for the country. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.209]

FABIANS / CHALLENGE TO THEIR OBJECTIVES

It was a difficult task which was undertaken by the Fabians - that of attempting to convince the British masses that there was no such thing in social matters as abstract rights - for somehow the working classes of England held tenaciously to the idea that without basic rights to support them, it was a poor lookout for them to depend on future "rights" that were to be granted by the State, when a new political and economic system was inaugurated by the Fabians. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.109]

FORD, HENRY

… the great lesson that Henry Ford endeavored to teach, during the Century of Progress Fair in Chicago, by setting up in a hall every process from the rawest material to the finished car, went practically unheeded. This was one of the greatest pieces of educational work in economics that was ever put before a people, but I never heard that any school or university thought it was worth the trouble to organize a band of students and take them to the Fair, for the specific purposes of seeing that show and having someone explain it to them. Perhaps no university professor capable of giving an explanation could be found! [ Man At The Crossroads, p.91]

FOUNDING FATHERS

Owing to the changes which have taken place in recent years with regard to all notions of liberty, it will soon be necessary to forget, for celebration speeches, all the Founding Fathers. We may be drawing near to the time when children in the schools will be told they must not mention the names of Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.169]

FRANCHISE, THE / AND POLITICAL DEMOCRACY

…in all countries, that there is a very large section of the proletariat, eligible for the electoral register, "fit and proper persons," to cast a vote but who are, so far as their own interests are concerned, utterly incompetent at any time to make a decision as to what is good for them. …the class I refer to should be disfranchised in the interest of what is called political democracy. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.37]

FREEDOM / ECONOMIC

Economic freedom surely means freedom to use land, and the corollary is, man himself must use it, without the assistance of government. Give man economic freedom and he needs no politician to subsidize him, no matter how dominating his personality may be to a certain type of elector. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.178]

Economic freedom means government of the community, by the community, and not bureaucratic government and the spoils system. [Man at The Crossroads, p.178]

FRIENDSHIPS

…friends can be the very worst wasters of one's time, … if I had followed the bent that is so common today, I feel sure that I would never have been able to cope with the tasks that fell to my lot. [ My Life in Two Worlds, pp.147 and 148]

FRIENDSHIPS / INTELLECTUAL AND PHILOSOPHIC

What attracted me to [the few men and women I usually associated with in Chicago] was their intellectual powers. They were eminent in their professions and each always had something to give me that would improve my mind. And I hope they sought my company because they could learn something from me. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.149]

FRONTIER

A frontier is not a mere geographical line drawn to mark the boundary of ownership and jurisdiction; it is something else; it is a wall of protection against invaders and, whether there be actually a wall built to mark the area or not, the frontier can be maintained as the State desires, only through restrictive rules and regulations, the breaking of which would instantly bring upon the head of the culprit severe penalties. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.30]

GENERAL WELFARE

There can be no general welfare without justice and liberty. There can be no tranquility without justice and liberty. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.212]

GENERAL WELFARE / AND U.S. CONSTITUTION

There is nothing suggested in the preamble which extends further than the precise powers conferred in the provisions of the articles, and those who would interpret the general welfare phrase in an economic or a social sense for local humanitarian purposes, are guilty of importing into the compact an idea utterly alien to the framers of the document. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.214]

GEORGE, HENRY

GOD / AND JUSTICE

Oppression melted the heart of the stern God of the Jews, and he pitied them. Economic subjugation was always the offence which at last called for heavenly intervention and brought aid from the Most High. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.3]

GOVERNMENT / LOCAL

Local government generally is just as rotten as it can be! This country [the United States] of all countries in the world, which practiced to advantage pioneering, inventiveness, large scale leisure, risk, frugality and thrift, when I knew it first, has become to a very great extent, so far as politics are concerned, a relief constituency. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.84]

GOVERNMENT DEBT

When considering this question of piling up debt and increasing the supply of paper, it must not be forgotten that the future is heavy with clouds, for the Social Security scheme is one of the chief means today of increasing the loan of paper that labor must redeem some time in the future. It is already recognized by the experts that labor of the next generation will be producing the old-age pensions of its own fathers. [ Man at The Crossroads, pp. 262-263]

GREECE, ANCIENT / WEAKNESS OF

Behind the splendor of Greece there was a world of bitterness and suffering. The populace clamored for doles; men were paid for attending their own assembly; …and, no matter how many concessions were made by the State to keep them quiet, the people cried out for more and more, always desiring something new. This was the condition of Athens when her freemen were the parasites of their slaves. …Tax collectors roamed the country, searching for hidden wealth and often these tax gatherers were accompanied by garrisons to enforce the fiscal regulations. [ Man at The Crossroads, p. 269]

HAPPINESS / SOURCE OF

Most people have nothing definite to do with themselves; no large program for the good of themselves or of others, to occupy their minds and prove to be an avocation that will tend to make them happy. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.140]

HISTORY / REASONS FOR RECORDING

Precious little history would have been worth recording if war and invasion had not brought about the extremes of power and weakness, riches and poverty, monopoly and slavery. It is only when a background for a people is required, that the historian collaborates with the archaeologist, who is better qualified for the job of seeking origins. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.39]

...man's misery is the very basis on which his recorded history is usually built up. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.55]

HUMAN POWERS

With man, … the endowment of mind suggests not only productive power, and that in the exercise of that power he should strive to satisfy his desires and needs with the least exertion; it also suggests the power of establishing an order for his security, not only with regard to his subsistence, but security, also against every physical and elemental menace against his person. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.42.]

IMMIGRATION / AND "AMERICANISM"

We are scarcely affiliated in any way with the times of our fathers. Every tradition has been broken. Every bond, which united us to the men who threw off the shackles of George III and North, is severed. There are substantial reasons for this: one is that the stock which held to the tradition, and was all for tightening the bonds of our union, is in the minority. And the reasons why the northern stocks have suffered numerically is to be attributed to indiscriminate immigration. The result is that there have been raised, in the past fifty years, stocks which can never become American in the way that northern stocks became American and, therefore, these peoples are without a tradition of almost any kind, and fail utterly to appreciate the origin of the United States, and the causes which set the American Revolution in motion. [ Man at The Crossroads, pp.173-174]

In a decade [beginning with the McKinley Presidency] the face of the country was changed. The migrations from the East to the West had been taking place for some time and, as the population increased, other peoples crowded into the cities and strange name sreplaced those of the older stocks - people from eastern Europe and the Mediterranean seemed, in numbers of congested districts, to be crowding out the folk of the more stable nations of western civilization. [Man at The Crossroads, p.197]

Nothing of practical value was done to help the newcomers to understand the traditions of the country, and enter into the spirit of its genius. [Man at The Crossroads, p.198]

IMMIGRATION / FUNDAMENTAL REASON FOR

The great emigrations were misery movements; flood, climate, hunger driving men hither and thither, like hordes of wolves, like locusts, consuming all in the tragic struggle of finding a settlement. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.56]

INDIVIDUALISM / ORIGINS OF

…there is no good reason why we should not imagine, in lieu of tangible evidence, that early man was placed here to work out his own destiny - not as a group, but as an individual. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.24]

INFLATION / MONETARY

…as the cost of government increases, the purchasing power of money declines, and as purchasing power falls in value, fewer products are demanded from labor and from this follows a lessening of demand for workers. [ Man at The Crossroads, p. 264]

INJUSTICE / ASSOCIATED WITH TREATING LAND AS PROPERTY

…many brilliant men who have gained the world's ear have fallen victim to this extraordinary misconception. They have never considered what property is, but rather the use to which it is put by certain sections of the community. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.63]

INVESTMENT STRATEGY

My object was always that of a long-term investment, backed up by sound capitalization. Never did I take any interest in the speculative side of the stock market. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.134]

ISAIAH / BIBLICAL BOOKS OF

It is possible now to get an idea of the environment of Nazareth after the death of Herod. And these chapters, the last eight of the book of Isaiah, the import and significance of which have been neglected by critic and preacher, may have been the manifestoes of hope which inspired the Zealots and their followers. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.35]

These poems, calling for justice, the restoration of God's justice, have never been understood; their place in old Hebrew hope and aspiration is unknown, because prophets, the authors and speakers of the poems, were not priests in authority, the most unlikely people to stamp with approval texts revealing their own imperfections. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.36]

The climax of promise reached in these economic poems exceeds in beauty anything in the realms of utopia-building. It is the most perfect specimen of economic peace and fullness to be found in the poetry of any people. How it has been missed by critics and preachers cannot be explained; why it has been neglected by the labour propagandists is a mystery. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.37]

JEFFERSON, THOMAS

Jefferson realized that it was not difficult to set up despotic government in a democracy, and in Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1782, there is to be found a whole series of fears which perplexed him, regarding the future of democracy. [ Man at The Crossroads, pp. 170-171]

He realized that the franchise was of little use if it were possible for the holders of office to legislate in their own interest. [Man at The Crossroads, p.171]

Every important defect that Jefferson foresaw in the operation of the administrative branches of the government is now practiced with impunity. [Man at The Crossroads, p.172]

JEWS / HISTORY OF

The history of the Jews is the history of a folk suffering the penalties of violating fundamental laws. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.5]

JUSTICE / ARISTOTLE ON

Aristotle is nowhere clear as to what justice is. In Politics, he lays it down that "justice is a political virtue, by the rules of it the state is regulated," but it may be cliamed that justice is not necessarily a political virtue because the rules of it regulate the state. If the rules of justice as a political virtue are the criterion, as Aristotle says, of what is right, how can the slave basis of the state he reconciled with such rules? ...The principle he grants one moment is abolished the next by a political expedient. "Since, then, some men are slaves by nature, and others are freemen, it is clear that where slavery is advantageous to anyone, then it is just to make him a slave." Evidently, justice concerns not slaves; it is a virtue allotted politcally to freeman. So far away is Aristotle from Socrates in this respect, that the former does not hesitate to lay the foundations of a state historically unstable, while the latter made sure to build his idea of the simple state on a firm economic basis. [The Eleventh Commandment, pp.63-64]

JUSTICE / AS BASIS FOR CLAIMS TO PROPERTY

For justice is before and above judgment and piety; it is a system fundamental to the relationship between man and his Maker. It is antecedent to all positive law. It is the basis of title to own produce. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.29]

JUSTICE / DEFINITION OF

And what is justice? Justice is the opportunity to build and inhabit, to plant and to eat, to enjoy the work of one's hands. It is equailty of opportunity to use the earth provided by God for his creatures, whose sustenance is drawn from it, from it and no other source. Justice is the basis of man's right to life, and also the basis of ownership of the wealth he produces. ...Without it man is lost -- as in every civilization of which there is record, lost as he is today, as he was in Babylon, in India, in Greece, in Rome, all fearful examples of the curse which followed the removal of a neighbour's landmark. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.39]

JUSTICE / MEANS OF ACHIEVING

What, then, must be done? Liberate all those who are concerned in production, in industry. But how is this to be done? There is only one way, and that is to take those values that are created by the community for the use of government and abolish all taxes that fall upon wealth. The justice of this proposal should be patent to all thinking people, for it is recognized that land value is created by the community. Therefore, each and every one is heir to that vast estate. Here, we ground such a proposal on the broad base of economic justice, and lay a system in which every man, woman and child has an equal interest. [ Man at The Crossroads, pp. 271-272]

LABOR / DEFINITION OF, IN POLITICAL ECONOMY

Labour mean[s] ... all human exertion; and service mean[s] ... rendering service to labour, and being paid for by labour, as labour enjoys, gains, benefits, or profits. The services indispensable to men were then what they are now: the priest's, the poet's, the physician's, the musician's. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.16]

LABOR / LEVEL OF WAGES PAID

…high wages, in general were paid by none but unprotected industries. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.84]

LABOR UNIONS / RIGHT TO STRIKE

If there be a "right to strike," it must arise out of the individual's true right to himself and his labor. Short of the conditions of a slave, there is no power to make one man work for another when he does not desire to do so. When a minority, or a majority, of men band themselves together to strike and cease working, this action must in no way infringe the equal right of those who do not want to strike, to labor as they desire. [ Man at The Crossroads, pp.120-121]

LAND / AS SOURCE OF ALL HUMAN MATERIAL NEEDS

No matter how complicated the commercial and financial systems may be, man remains a land animal, and cannot get his raw-material form any other source than the earth. So, with regard to fundamental economics, man fundamentally remains where he was. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.92.]

LAND / NOT WEALTH AND NOT PROPERTY

The land on which his house is built is not produced by him. Therefore, …tracts of bare land cannot be property, for they are not wealth, and were not produced by labor. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.63]

LAND MONOPOLY

The true economic royalists of this country are the land monopolists, … [ Man at The Crossroads, p.218]

There is no economic royalist in industry that is at all comparable to the one who holds land and does not use it himself. [Man at The Crossroads, p.219]

LAND REFORM / HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

Of the many reforms attributed to Lycurgus those of land redistribution and the the currency are of especial interest here. The inequalities of land-holding were dreadful; "the city was heavily burdened with indigent and helpless people, and wealth was wholly concentrated in the hands of the few." This description of Sparta fits England, America, France; indeed, it might be taken from the speech of a modern liberal legislator. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.60]

LANDLESSNESS

It is of no use for labor to talk about the "right to work" so long as it is landless, and the only way that it can have this right restored is by recapturing the alternative to entering a congested labor market. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.131]

LANDLESSNESS / EQUIVALENT TO CHATTEL SLAVERY

A chattel slave know he was a slave; he knew he was bought to labor and he knew the indentures of his servitude. He endured conditions every day which reminded him of his status. In a democracy such as this, the landless laborer is given what is called the freeman's certificate, a vote, but he is nevertheless a slave under a system of private ownership of the rent of land. He has to pay a fellow mortal for the right to use the earth, the only source from which he can draw his sustenance. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.219]

LAW / FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE, TO BE JUST

The most important economic law is that against land encroachment, laying field to field, and reducing the dispossessed to slave conditions. "Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark." This is the fundamental law, which establishes firmly man's relationship to God, and the violation of this ordinance was always the cause of disasters which fell upon Israel, the woe of the tribes, and the sin which stirred the prophets to utter their deepest condemnations, whether the landmarks were removed by Jew or Gentile. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.14]

LAW / MOSAIC FOUNDATIONS OF

All legislation was decreed before all the people, and the acceptance of the laws was unanimous. Moses took the book of the covenant and read in the audience of the peole, and they said: "All that the Lord hath said will we do and be obedient." [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.7]

LAW / RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF, TO BE JUST

Before occupying the promised land all must know the conditions of re-inheritance. The law and testimony were the foundation-stones of settlement; no reconstruction of an enduring nature was possible without them. ...There was to be no tribute, no debt through usury and spoliation, and no slavery. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.4]

LAW / NATURAL

The law of liberty of production is perhaps the oldest of fundamental laws. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.44]

Most of those who object to natural rights and natural law never seem to come to grips with the essentials of the matter. Nearly all the opponents are satisfied by rejecting them with a flat denial. [Man at The Crossroads, p.123]

LAW / UNJUST

Taking what does not belong to one is a crime, no matter whether there is a tax law to protect the collector or not. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.223]

LAWS / OF THE COVENANT

The great cry of God's prophets for justice rises like the roar of a mighty storm and fills the skies with forbidding thunder. Execute justice! Do this and all will be well. If you do not this, desolation will fall upon you. ...To the labourer the fruit of his toil. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.27]

The old covenant read distinctly to all the people would certainly help the nobles to lay all doubts as to the enormity of their iniquities. The third curse, read with sense and understanding, would powerfully affect those who had despoiled the people by removing the landmarks. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.33]

LAWYERS

…lawyers as a class have never mastered the rudiments of precise speech and clear writing. The reason for this is twofold: the first is, modern legalistic expression is a hindrance to clear thinking; the second is, that practicing lawyers have never been known to waste much time on the study of the fundamentals of law. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.108]

The appalling ignorance of history, revealed in the writings of young men who have come from the law schools of the United States in the past fifteen years or twenty years is equaled only by the ignorance of economics on the part of our modern sociologists. [Man At The Crossroads, p.114]

The intellectual difference between the lawyers who lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the lawyers of classical times seems to be that the former were merely legalists without historical knowledge, and the latter were jurists who recognized the fundamental difference between natural rights and law. [Man at The Crossroads, p.124]

LIBERTY / MEANING OF

It may be that the day is coming when we shall know what the word liberty really means, and it is possible that if we do get a clear definition of the term liberty, we shall have it clearly understood what is property and what is not property. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.68]

MARX, KARL / ON LANDLESSNESS

Because [colonists to Australia] landed on a shore where landlords were unknown, …they had only to step ashore to have all their natural rights restored. Is is any wonder that Marx was forced to the conclusion that "the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production." [ Man at The Crossroads, p.132]

MARRIAGE

All my shackles were of my own making. It is not given to us to foretell the consequences of our acts. Two people may unite, with every hope of a happy future, and little dream of the impediments that will arise in the days to come. There are always insistent obligations to be considered, but in the fervor of the union they are not envisioned by the mind. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.190]

Marriage leads so frequently to a blind alley, a cul-de-sac, that few would seek it, if it were possible to look into the future. The ties of one or the other may create conditions that will endanger the intimacy and loyalty of both. [My Life in Two Worlds, p.192]

MOSES / AS ECONOMIST

Moses was more than a great law-giver; he was an all-seeing economist whose system still inheres in the fairest constitutions down to this day, no matter how overgrown they be by injustice, folly, and greed. Somewhere -- sometimes dormant, sometimes forgotten -- the principles of his system are discovered in the early customs of a people; sometimes in charters, never really abrograted. [ The Eleventh Commandment, pp. 12-13]

...he knew the danger of borrowing, how the system of mortgage, unchecked, tends to lay the borrower under the burdens approximating bondage. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.13]

MOSES / TREATMENT OF IN THE BIBLE

Disentangling the main story of Moses and the Israelits from the first five books of the Bible is not a simple task. No serious attempt has been made to present the story of Moses stripped of all priestly accretions, mostly of a very late period, which clog and cloak the real object and purpose in leaving Egypt for Canaan. The priests after Ezra almost succeeded in removing the original Moses from the record. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.8]

There is little to show Moses was a ritualist. The decalogue itself requires no priest to interpret it. Indeed, it is quite clearly shown that the duties of the early priests were concerned with religious, social, and hygienic observances only, and that the fundamental conditions of the settlement, save that of tithe, escpaed their notice. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.9]

OPPENHEIMER, FRANZ

"It is refreshing in a book which pretends to inform us as to the origin and the nature of the State, to find a writer wedding a theory of economics to a philosophy of history. The union, however, in Oppenheimer's case did not bring forth a perfect offspring. …I know of no work in short compass that treats the development of the State historically with a grasp of data so thorough, and with a force so clear and arresting. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.51]

PLATO / ON THE INJUSTICES OF THE STATE

The conditions of Athens are laid bare, and not until Socrates rubs their noses in the mess do they realize how deep the mire of injustice goes under the fair face of that state. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.76]

So ages ago, justice was tumbling out at their feet. Glaucon and the others had been looking for something they would not know if they saw it, and it was not necessary to create the luxurious state. What chance of recognizing justice had they in a state at fever-heat, if they could not find her in the simple one? But the creation of the luxurious state gave Socrates the opportunity he desired of taking the lid off Athens and exposing her numberless rascalities. There, injustice in every form ws rampant: slavery, meddlesomeness and interference, assertions of unlawful authority, rebellious subjects -- "what is all this confusion and delusion but injustice and intemperance and cowardice and ignorance, and every form of vice?" he asks.

[The Eleventh Commandment, p.81]

PLATO / PRINCIPLES OF THE JUST REPUBLIC

... there are two distinct books in The Republic, and the task of Socrates, defining justice, is contained in the first section -- the first four books, which might have been given the title -- "Justice." The second section, Books V-X, deals with the construction of the luxurious state. But the luxurious state is used antithetically, as a terrible example not to be followed, for the state finally constructed in the second section is the very reverse of luxurious; it is communistic, and not strictly that, because the question of the ownership of the land -- private or communal -- is left open. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.69]

... the conception of justice defined by Socrates was purely individualistic and utterly foreign to any conception of communism. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.69]

Justice is the true aim of the first section, and not the state, because the discovery of justice is essential for hte foundation of the economic state, and its nature and operation will determine the kind of state to be built. This search for the origin and nature of justice in the first four books of The Republic, when the Greek states were tottering, is one of the most vital contributions to philosophy bequeathed by ancient civilizations. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.71]

PLATO / PURPOSE IN WRITING THE REPUBLIC

The object being justice, not the state. Then he points out the reason why the analogy is useful to their purpose: the state arises out of the needs of mankind. Here the state is a mere idea, as Kant would say. Socrates labours under no delusion, for he knew Athens, and that was state enough for his experience. Indeed, he starts the new approach by saying: "Let us begin and create in idea a state." In idea. The model will be a figment of the imagination, so unlike any concrete example that the very term state may be an absurd misnomer; ... [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.74]

POWER / GOVERNMENTAL

The modern legislator … seems to think two wrongs always make a right, and that there is no better way of reforming abuses than by government adopting the abuses that it frowns upon, if they be practiced by what now goes by the term "predatory interests." [ Man at The Crossroads, p.66]

PRICE / AS A MARKET-CLEARING DEVICE

The demand of consumers for goods depends largely on the price and the quality of the desired article, and this again depends upon the purchasing power of the people's money, the purchasing power of the bill when exchanged for the articles required by the household. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.130]

PRIVILEGE

You cannot grant a privilege to one section of the community with the certainty that no other section of the community will ask for a like privilege. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.136]

PRIVILEGE / MASQUERADING AS RIGHTS

…most of the rights that we hear about today are not rights at all; they are merely privileges strictly limited to what is called "high pressure groups." These controversies are clouded by all the vapors of sentimentalism and superficial notions of political economy, … [ Man at The Crossroads, p.135]

PRODUCTIVITY

It is true we have perfected machines, but with all the new machines to aid us, we have discovered no new fundamentals. We move faster, with greater ease; we see farther; we record earthquakes; we discern almost the infinitesimal and, for the production of our food, fuel, clothing and shelter, we have made machines which reduce exertion almost to a minimum and yet, millions go hungry and ill-clad. …the more we pride ourselves on our achievements, the more surely poverty keeps step with progress. [ Man at The Crossroads, p. 86]

PROPERTY / AS WEALTH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY

So property is wealth: primarily, food, fuel, clothing and shelter, and all the labor-products which are accessories in the production and use of these things. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.63]

PROPERTY / DEFINED

What is property? It is wealth produced by labor, with the assistance of capital, from land. [ Man At the Crossroads, p.62]

Property is wealth, and wealth is matter moved by labor. The mover of wealth is the owner of wealth and, as owner of it, he has the right to bequeath it to anyone or to exchange it with anyone for other wealth. [Man at The Crossroads, pp.239-240]

The land on which his house is built is not produced by him. Therefore, …tracts of bare land cannot be property, for they are not wealth, and were not produced by labor. [Man At The Crossroads, p.63]

PROPERTY / IN LAND, AMONG TRIBAL SOCIETIES

Numbes of the African tribes know that only what a man produces can be his own, and that he has the right to leave it to his heirs, exchange it, or give it away. In numbers of the tribes there is no such thing as private ownership of land; all land is held in trusteeship by the chief of the tribe. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.42]

PROPERTY / NATIONALIZATION OF

Every State that has made an attempt to nationalize property has been forced to make an exemption with regard to the almost numberless articles that are required in daily use by the laborer. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.240]

PROPERTY / RIGHTS TO

Property rights in economics are easily defined, although lawyers have done everything they could, through the centuries, to sheer off from the fundamentals of the questions. It is the lawyer who is to blame for the complicated mess that exists - a mess so murky that it has completely hidden the bed-rock on which ownership of wealth is based. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.239]

PROPHETS / AS CONSERVATIVES

The prophet was the rebel, the priest was the Tory, or, to put it after the English manner, the prophet was the true conservative, desiring to restore the law and custom of the land, and the priest at best was the Tory, multiplying forms to the detriment of the substance of law and custom. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.36]

PROTECTIONISM

It is a species of robbery which is waged under the banner of patriotism and nationalism. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.141]

POVERTY / CAUSES OF

Before man became so civilized as to be a meek tribute-payer, the only poverty he was likely to know was that occasioned by drought or flood. Yet even in such extreme cases of scarcity brought about by natural causes, he might have had a surplus of his own which would help him to survive periods of little or no harvest. Surplus taught him thrift, not only for seed, ftime of ill-fortune also. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.47]

POVERTY / ENTRENCHED NATURE OF

…there is no hope at all of the poor and needy every escaping from the grip of poverty, so long as the politician has need of them,, not only for votes but for appropriations. The poor and needy are the essential pawns in the game. Furthermore, they must continue over long periods in their impoverished condition because they are serviceable for the purposes of oratory. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.183]

POVERTY / SOLUTION TO

If [man] hath the power, through the development of scientific method, to war upon disease and conquer it, he hath the power, also, to conquer the problems of ignorance and poverty; but in order to succeed in doing this, he must treat fundamental economics as a science, and master the political difficulties of his own creation. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.8]

PRIESTHOOD / APPEARANCE OF

Fear came with legends, and legends brought priests, and then simple, pristine worship was merged after many generations with amultitudinous theogony. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.46]

PUBLIC REVENUE / LAND VALUES AS JUST SOURCE OF

The land on which one hundred and thirty millions of people exist must have sufficient value to yield all that is required in taxation for the purposes of a sane government and, so long as that source is there, and is scarcely taxed at all, the land being grossly undervalued everywhere, it is iniquitous to tax wealth. [ Man at The Crossroads, pp.68-69]

REFORM / ECONOMIC

What aims of economic reform in many lands were fostered a hundred years ago! And now bureaucracy sits safely and tightly upon the throne made for it by the taxpayers. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.77]

REFORM / IN SPARTA, UNDER LYCURGUS

A man of ideas was Lycurgus, but, though he made powerful Spartans and kept his state disciplined in every department, the Helots, who made all the reforms possible, groaned under the yoke without hope. "In Sparta the freeman is more a freeman than anywhere else in the world, and the slave more a slave." The reforms of Lycurgus endured for some two hundred years, but they were reforms only and left the economic basis of the state, the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few, intact. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.61]

REFORMERS

The evil of the political system is that it never produced a man who could save it. There is no room in that system for a savior. All that the politician of the best type can do within the system, is to carry on. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.40]

The great difficulty to be faced is that of the social position of the would-be reformer. …Our reformers know little or nothing about the poor. …The so-called reforms that they suggest are sufficient evidence of this. As a rule, they see one specific abuse, and they go for that, without the slightest idea of what it will mean to the sufferers if that abuse be reformed. [Man at The Crossroads, p.193]

They do not realize that the creation of the bureaucrats will, undoubtedly, increase the expense of government, and throw greater burdens upon the workers. What is gained in order is lost in betterment. [Man at The Crossroads, p.194]

RELIGION / DEVELOPMENT OF

What is called religion ... seems to be a very late development in the economic history of man. He had reached quite a high state of civilization when he worshipped the Creater, the earth, and the son of the union of the Father (Creator) and Mother (Earth). Other deities came much later. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.44]

It was gratitude, not fear, that prompted man to worship the first deity -- the Creator. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.45]

Man, the land animal, the tool-making producer, worshipped first the Creator who gave him the source from which he obtained his food, and then his fuel, and then his clothing. Gratitude surely came long before fear in the scheme of deity-making. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.45]

RENT / EFFECTS, WHEN TREATED AS PUBLIC REVENUE

When there is only one source of revenue, government will be reduced to a minimum, and politicians will have to work as producers, or as persons who will render a positive service in science and arts to the community, when required. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.178]

RESPECT FOR THE WISE

It has taken long centuries to select from the remains of other civilizations certain men who, as sages, have stood the test of time. …But nobody pays any attention to the wise now. Why? Merely because they lived in the past and, as things now differ in degree, all must be different, and what the wise of classical times had to say about morals, conduct, business, love, hatred, war, peace and wealth, can have no meaning to the modern. [Man At The Crossroads, p.59]

RETIREMENT / AND LIFE OUTSIDE THE CITY

It is only since we came to live [at Harbor Acres, on Long Island, New York] that my mind has been liberated from the bonds of restraint. Here I have been able to shed the encumbrances civilization inflicts upon the urban dweller. The telephone rinks perhaps once a day. We see no evening paper. The work we have to do is so interesting that we could not spare an hour for television. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.291]

RIGHTS / AND DUTIES

…there are no rights without duties. A right is an obligation which insures the rights of others. Take away the rights of a thinking individual and he will have no time to think of duties. Indeed, it may be said: no rights, no social obligations. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.125]

RIGHTS / ABANDONED UNDER NEWER RELIGIOUS COVENANTS

New covenants usually consolidate privileges gained by infringing the rights of the old one. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.10]

RIGHTS / LOSS OF

…it was not until he lost his right to use the earth, when the State born of conquest and robbery was set up, that he discovered he had lost his right to the full value of his produce. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.128]

RIGHTS / NATURAL

Natural right is prior to and independent of the State. It is the prince who makes the law, for the protection of his State. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.106]

The question of natural rights stood as a stumbling block for years and, while that obstacle lay in their path, they could make no progress whatever. Hence, the desire of the Fabians and Socialists to abolish natural rights, clear them out of the way and, in their place, confer the granting of "rights" of any and every description upon the State. [Man At The Crossroads, pp.108-109]

Rights, natural rights, inhere in the individual. They are born with him. Rights are created, not conferred. All the State can do is to grant, permit or confer privileges upon individuals or bodies of individuals. [Man At The Crossroads, p.115]

The primary rights of man are three: (1) the natural right of a man to himself, which includes the rights of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of action. Without the right to himself, thought, speech and action cannot be used in his own defense nor as aids to his sustenance. (2) The natural right to use the earth, for the reason that he cannot draw food, fuel, clothing, and shelter from any other source. The earth is indispensable to him, as it is to any other animal. (3) The natural right to the product of his labor. [Man at The Crossroads, p.127]

RIGHTS / NATURAL, PRECEDE THE STATE

Ancient man['s] ... rights antedate the state, for his rights are economic, or the magistrate bgefore he could freely use the capitalist, or the magistrate before he could freely use the earth to produce his sustenance. State rights, which are really not rights at all and ought to be called state privileges, must have come comparatively late in the development of man. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.46]

RIGHTS / UPHOLDING OF

My contention is as follows: conscious of the value of his own rights, a man cannot fail to protect them by assuring his fellows that he places an equal value on their rights and that it is his duty, arising from his knowledge of the value of his own right, to act with regard to the rights of others as if they were his own to protect. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.125]

ROOSEVELT ADMINISTRATION

…the list of racketeering acts of this government, if given in length, would require a volume. Anyway, there is not one thing that the government has blamed business for doing in a nefarious manner, that it has not perpetrated day in and day out for the past five years. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.75]

Racketeering is practiced upon defenseless people in the form of exacting tribute. The racketeering of the government, as practiced upon industry, differs in no vital respect, safe one…, for it must be understood that the intention of the government in its method of practicing this science is made clear now; to single out the people of means (which in America is taken to be those who are industrious) and exact tribute from them, which, in other words, means that they are to be penalized for their industrial exertions. [Man at The Crossroads, p.81]

No one thinks it strange, in what is supposedly a democratic country, legislating through the media of parliamentary institutions, that only a very small percentage of the men in league with the administration have any commercial knowledge or business reputation. The vast majority are mere odds and ends of law schools who would certainly never think of going to Congress if they had shown the competence and ability to succeed at the Bar. [Man at The Crossroads, p.83]

Of course, nobody now believes for a moment that the "emergency" which came when he took office in 1933, amounted to anything more than a peculiarly shallow pretext for building up a bureaucracy of enormous strength, and gathering about him an army of yes-men. [Man at The Crossroads, p.167]

It is property the advisors of the President seem to be after; the property of private individuals, for they find that confiscation practiced through the process of income tax penalties may not yield sufficient to keep the poor and needy on their voting register as long as they desire. [Man at The Crossroads, p.210]

Whereas Lincoln and his party emancipated the Black Slaves, the present Executive and his party are enslaving the White folks. In plain terms, it comes to this: that if the government is to remain solvent, all labor - men, women, yes, and children, too - will have to produce the wealth that will meet this bill. [Man at The Crossroads, pp.256-257]

RUSSELL, BERTRAND

Russell says: "To lose faith in knowledge is to lose faith in the best of man's capacities." ... True enough, but there are many kinds of knowledge, and the knowledge which is called scientific would not fill a very large volume if it were divested of hypothetical aids and heuristic fictions. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.19]

SCIENCE / AND PURSUIT OF TRUTH

Presumably, economic truth, so simple as the fact that man is a land animal, cannot be determined by an isolated individual. Early man had to wait until a group of sociologists or philosophers appeared upon the scene before he could say with any degree of certainty at all, that he depended upon the earth for the gratification of his desires and needs. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.103]

Surely the scientific method in quest of the origin of disease should consider what civilizations of economic dislocation have done to break down mankind's powers of resistance and make man the prey of disease. ...When will the scientific method be applied to the economic causes of the tragedies of existence, viz. poverty, crime, and disease? [The Eleventh Commandment, p.18]

SELF-SUFFICIENCY

…the reason for this disinclination to fend for oneself on a few acres is not economic but social. It is said the country is too dull for the town-bred man and, when winter comes and snow keeps him penned up during the long nights, he does not know what to do with himself. As for living with books, and complaining that the night is not long enough, such a thing would be unheard of now. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.250]

[M]en who know the secret of the means of life need not gifts, for they can produce wealth. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.59]

SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

When I reached London in 1897, Shaw was dramatic critic for the Saturday Review. At that time he was deep in the study of Henry George's Progress and Poverty. He has attributed his interest in fundamental economics t this work, although nowhere in his writing does he reveal an understanding of George's definitions of economic terms. He gave it up because it would take too long to put the theories of George into practice, and he confesses he turned to Karl Marx's Das Kapital because it would accomplish the same end in a shorter time. [ My Life in Two Worlds, pp.240-241]

SLAVERY

Slavery was responsible for checking man's desire for cleanliness and battering down the gates of his resistance. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.7]

SLAVERY / AND THE STATE

…the relics of no civilization show that the freeman suffered restrictive laws to the extent that the freeman suffers under the State today. Most of the restrictions of which we know, that were imposed in classical times, fell upon the slave, and he was called a slave. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.26]

SLAVERY / ORIGINS IN CONQUEST AND TRIBUTE

Exploitation of labour began with conquest when tribute was exacted by conquerors for the use of land. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.43]

SLAVERY / NOT PREVENTED BY THE FRANCHISE

God and Moses ... did not abolish slavery merely by pasting over it a political label, franchise, and that way make the labourer think he was any the less a slave. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.7,8]

SOCIALISM

The question of natural rights stood as a stumbling block for years and, while that obstacle lay in their path, they could make no progress whatever. Hence, the desire of the Fabians and Socialists to abolish natural rights, clear them out of the way and, in their place, confer the granting of "rights" of any and every description upon the State. [ Man At The Crossroads, pp.108-109]

…Gronland tells us that the State and organized society are one and the same, which must mean … that organized society and the State represent an harmonious whole functioning in accordance with laws enacted for the benefit of the people as a whole. Whether this be true or not can be determined by considering the economic differences which exist between producers and bureaucrats. This has always been the acid test of the validity of such notions. Herein lies the fatal flaw in the theory of Socialism as it is laid down in the proposals and conceptions of the scheme for the equal benefit of all. How can there be equal benefit when producers have to work to supply the needs of the non-producers? [Man At The Crossroads, p.112]

SOCIALISTS

There is a striking difference between the addle-headed "liberal" Socialist of today and his fellow of a generation ago. Most of those who flirted with such notions before the turn of the century lived long enough to see the errors of their thought. Those of today are piling error upon error, and may not live long enough to verify the economic validity or expediency of their error-born theories. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.241]

SOCIOLOGISTS

There is one thing the sociologist has always forgotten in this business of data-collecting, and that is that humanity is not an industry. None of the ideas or conceptions they hold are applicable to masses of men and women. They are individuals - each man, each woman, is an individual - and no matter how the sociologists strive, along with the bureaucracy, to shape them into an homogeneous mass, they must fail because of the infinite variety of likes and dislikes of the herd. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.100]

And the most farcical thing about it is that the sociologists have the temerity to call their business a science. [Man At The Crossroads, p.101]

SPECIALIZATION

…specialization and compartmentalizing workers make it difficult to see clearly that it is labor, even though we call it by the other name consumers, that employs capital. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.95]

SPIRITUALITY

…the Bible is the only work which contains everything worth knowing. No branch of literature that can be thought of has been omitted from its books. It contains even the rudiments of natural science; and in the Book of Job, there is the undercurrent of the notions of the rationalists. …And as for philosophy, Ecclesiastes covers in short compass the alpha and omega for those who ponder the great problem of a way of life. [ My Life in Two Worlds, pp. 294-295]

SPIRITUALITY / AMONG ANCIENT SOCIETIES

In all worships the Creator provided the source of food before creating man. No creator, not one, in any of the ancient worships made man before the earth was made. All was done for man. The primitive creature had a sounder economic understanding of the wisdom of creation than have most of our modern philosophers. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.52]

Giving thanks, grace, is the oldest ceremony, and all the ritual of the ancients ... concerned with selecting, gathering, preparing, cooking, and serving food, bears witness to the sacred fact that worhship began when the active factor in production, man, used the passive factor, land, for the satisfaction of his desires and needs. [The Eleventh Commandment, pp. 53-54]

STATE, THE / DEFINED

The word "State" is difficult enough to define even when the order is simply and the area of jurisdiction comparatively small. …It is impossible to think of a State without speculating upon the reason for its creation. Really there is no such thing as a State qua "State," for we are told that the State is the body politic organized for supreme rule and government. But this definition fits no State within our knowledge. It refers to an ideal State; not to the State, in practice, which, by no stretch of the imagination, can be held to an organization of the body politic for supreme rule. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.46]

STATE, THE / LEGITIMATE FUNCTION OF

The State is a guardian of the rights of the individual, and the State has no other function. When the State, or the directors of it, assume to control the legitimate efforts and expressions of its people, it becomes very soon merely a sum of legalized relations, and a government composed of a body of influential politicians who desire to control the activities of the community. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.116]

STATE, THE / PARASITIC CLASS INEVITABLE

…it is utterly impossible to set up even a beneficent State, without creating the evil of a parasitic class. It may be said that governors serve in directing, and controlling, and preserving order, in maintaining the army, the navy, and the police. This is true enough; they do so in the beneficent State. But they, as governors, re, nevertheless, parasites, for they add nothing whatever to the production of wealth, and they ought never to be included in such services as those which minister to the legitimate needs and desires of man. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.32]

It should be plain to the thinking man that the evil of setting up a parasitic class, which began with the creation of the first State (call it a bureaucracy or what you will) has never changed in any particular, save that of becoming greater and more and more iniquitous in its greed for power. [Man At The Crossroads, p.35.]

STATE, THE / CAUSES OF DECAY

…the most noticeable symptom of decay of the State, that observers describe, is the form of anarchy which affects nearly all classes from the underworld to the very powers, legislative and judicial, to which we should look for safeguarding the best interests of society. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.30]

It is the same old story of the growth of the state: the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few. And, like all states, [Hammurabi] toppled from the height of its grandeur when slavery reached the maximum, undermined by the economic cancer upon which it rose to greatness. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.58]

STATE, THE / ENEMY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

…if we have reached the stage when it is absolutely necessary for a bureaucracy to do the thinking for individual producers and consumers, then man has ceased to be what he was! The State is the enemy of man. The State has undertaken to do practically all the thinking for him, at least so far as all necessaries are concerned, and has consequently reduced him to a mere body afflicted with inanition of thought for himself. [ Man at The Crossroads, p. 88]

There never was a State whose chief interest was the preservation of the wealth of its people. Such a thing is impossible under a political system. …All are crying out for privileges and licenses, but scarcely anyone shows the slightest desire to have rights restored. [Man At The Crossroads, p.107]

STATE, THE / LEGITIMATE BASE FOR ACCORDING TO PLATO

The basis of this state must be common ownership of land. The business of supplying the demands for food, dwellings, and clothing is not handicapped at the outset by landlords, solicitors, or bailiffs. The husbandman, the builder, the weaver, and the shoemaker are not so far retricted; as producers they have equal opportunity to use the source from which they will produce the supplies. Rent, taxes, tariffs, and charitable contributions have not been invented yet. [ The Eleventh Commandment, p.]

STATE, THE / ORIGINS OF

The pet theory that the family is the foundation of the State can only be imagined by looking back on the mammoth, the monkey or the mouse, and considering any one of them as likely creatures, because of their parenthood, for forming a State. It is, of course, very hard to imagine our standing with the first man, in the midst of his family, and looking forward to the time when somebody would invent the State for him. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.11]

…early man had no one to advise him, no one to provide for him, and no one to restrict his movement. He was left entirely to himself. He was without politician, without police, without social or State aid in any particular. [Man At The Crossroads, p.12]

There would never have been a State … unless there was something worth taking: the property of the producer. [Man At The Crossroads, p.61]

STOCK MARKET CRASH OF 1929

When the crash came in 1929, I was quite unprepared to meet it; and if I had been prepared, I would probably have but put off, because my American friends in London (where I was at the time) never dreamed it would be so severe. I was advised to hold on, although my better sense told me that things were going to be worse. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.132]

SURVIVAL / DEPENDENT ON LEARNING

The earth itself is not only the storehouse of every need of man, it is also the storehouse of everything that can do him harm. …But experience, which was essential, taught him what was to be avoided and why he should seek shelter from the elements, and discover regions where he might live in security. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.3.]

We know why certain creatures disappeared from the earth. The altered conditions of terrain, climate, and food supply, account largely for their disappearance. But man surmounted not only all these difficulties; he also overcame the innumerable vicissitudes which beset him in pillage, slavery, and war. …man is here, and man is proving slowly but surely that he can conquer disease. [Man At The Crossroads, pp.5-6]

…natural fears, if they may be so called, forced [man] to think of means of defense, and the occupation of searching for food was made doubly intensive by having to think constantly of how he could preserve himself against attack. [Man At The Crossroads, p.17]

TAXATION / AS CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE POOR

The evidence of a conspiracy against the poor is written clearly in English history. …But the greatest evidence of it is to be found in the period from 1760 on. It began with the change in the system of taxation and reached its culmination at the time of the enclosures by act of Parliament, when the countryside was depopulated, and the landless flocked into the towns. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.104]

TECHNOLOGY / CONCERNS OVER

We go too fast to see the world; we have no time for introspection. The result is, man has made a god of the machine which he is perfecting and, at the same time, hastening the day when it will turn upon him and rend him to pieces. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.187]

TIME

…I am never conscious of time as it passes, never keep my eye on the clock. Some other sense - a strange variant of visualization -- gives me a surety that the task will be done when it should be done. [ My Life in Two Worlds, pp. 180-181]

TRADITION

It is like the experience of a man's life: it is the sum of all his defeat, of all his triumph, and he can no more dispense with that at any time of his life, no matter how conditions change, than he can dispense with his own soul; for, indeed, it is a part of his soul. The vicissitudes through which he has passed have marked him indelibly, and shaped him as a man. So it is with the tradition of a country, … [ Man at The Crossroads, p.154]

We are scarcely affiliated in any way with the times of our fathers. Every tradition has been broken. Every bond, which united us to the men who threw off the shackles of George III and North, is severed. There are substantial reasons for this: one is that the stock which held to the tradition, and was all for tightening the bonds of our union, is in the minority. And the reasons why the northern stocks have suffered numerically is to be attributed to indiscriminate immigration. The result is that there have been raised, in the past fifty years, stocks which can never become American in the way that northern stocks became American and, therefore, these peoples are without a tradition of almost any kind, and fail utterly to appreciate the origin of the United States, and the causes which set the American Revolution in motion. [Man at The Crossroads, pp.173-174]

UNEMPLOYMENT / AND PUBLIC POLICY

The attempt to solve the problem of unemployed persons by the patriarchal State setting up as an employer, has led to another difficulty which is that of shortening the hours of labor, so that employers will be "forced" to hire more men. But neither State employment, nor shortening the hours of labor in private industry, will do more than relieve some of the unemployed to the disadvantage of others. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.117]

And with all the doles, all the charity, private and municipal, the demand for relief increases daily, and not one single suggestion comes from those in authority as to how the awful problem might be solved. Every expedient is to be tried: higher tariffs, lower tariffs, gold standard, off gold standard, less gold ratio to deposits, unfreezing bank assets, inflation, higher taxation, and the hundred and one "thimblerigging tricks of statesmen and financiers," but no fundamental change, nothing to alter the system, only such aids as will prop it up and save it from immediate collapse. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.21]

UNION OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL

The Union of Democratic Control had become an adjunct of the Labor party, and I feared that its usefulness as a movement for the revision of the treaties had been frittered away. [ My Life in Two Worlds, p.95]

VALUE / IN EXCHANGE

Desire gives value, and when there is neither humanitarian, nor artificial impediment, every consumer, no matter at what he labors, wishes to buy in the best and in the cheapest market. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.141]

VOCATION / AGRICULTURE AS PRIMARY FORM OF

It may very well be that man was from the first fitted for agriculture, and that the primary industry should be his regular vocation. Perhaps one of the reasons for the present chaos is that man has departed from his original vocation and become, to a great extent, a maker of and a dweller in cities. At any rate, it must appear to the thoughtful that the further man has departed from agriculture, his natural vocation, and the further he has developed manufacturing, the greater has become his desire for luxury, and the business of making a living for the millions has become harder and harder. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.23]

WAGES / DEFINED

The first man worked for wage. What was his wage? His produce. Produce is wage. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.94]

WEALTH / REDISTRIBUTION OF

It seems the more complicated the business of the State becomes, the more confused become the minds of the people who would reform it. And we have the preposterous situation in which men, who do not know what property is, would take it (because they consider the owners of great masses of it are "predatory" persons and did not accumulate it honestly) and divide it among the proletariat and the politicians. [ Man At The Crossroads, p.57]

In attempting to devise a scheme for a redistribution of wealth, they are assuredly and swiftly reducing the purchasing power of wealth, for a tax on wealth must be paid by the producers of it. Ultimately, it cannot be paid in any other way, or by any others persons. [Man at The Crossroads, p.254]

WEALTH / TAXATION OF

There can be no economic freedom so long as there is a system of taxation of wealth, for all taxes on wealth are paid ultimately by the consumers. There can be no economic freedom so long as restriction, discouragement, and regimentation are the orders of the day. [ Man at The Crossroads, p.178]

The government today is levying higher and higher taxes upon the producers of wealth, no matter who the person may be who owns it for the time being. [Man at The Crossroads, p.255]

It is perfectly clear that, if a man is to enjoy the work of his hands, no one, as landlord or other tax-collector, can stand between him and the produce of his labour. [The Eleventh Commandment, p.16]