Albert Jay Nock Short Quotes

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Man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion.

Albert Jay Nock
Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.

Albert Jay Nock
As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

Albert Jay Nock
The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit.

Albert Jay Nock
When we speak freely, let us speak plainly, for plain speech is wholesome; especially, plain speech about public affairs and public men.

Albert Jay Nock
Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to escape it than most people make to get it.

Albert Jay Nock
The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.

Albert Jay Nock
The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests — if you try to feed it with a shovel you get bad results.

Albert Jay Nock
Money does not pay for anything, never has, never will. It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services.

Albert Jay Nock
The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.

Albert Jay Nock
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.

Albert Jay Nock
The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.

Albert Jay Nock
Driving jobholders out of office is like the old discredited policy of driving prostitutes out of town. Their places are immediately taken by others who are precisely like them.

Albert Jay Nock
It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it, and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.

Albert Jay Nock
Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

Albert Jay Nock
The glossary of politics is so full of euphemistic words and phrases — as in the nature of things it must be — that one would suppose politicians must sometimes strain their wits to coin them.

Albert Jay Nock
As a general principle, I should put it that a man's country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.

Albert Jay Nock