Isabel Paterson Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Isabel Paterson
But in reason if one man has no right to command all other men—the expedient of despotism—neither has he any right to command even one other man; nor yet have ten men, or a million, the right to command even one other man, for ten times nothing is nothing, and a million times nothing is nothing.

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

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

Isabel Paterson
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.

Isabel Paterson
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.

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

Isabel Paterson
The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.

Isabel Paterson
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.

Isabel Paterson
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.

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

Isabel Paterson
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.

Isabel Paterson
Whether it does any good or not, a law enforced must hurt someone.

Isabel Paterson
When the word leader, or leadership, returns to current use, it connotes a relapse into barbarism. For a civilized people, it is the most ominous word in any language.

Isabel Paterson
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.

Isabel Paterson
In human affairs, all that endures is what men think.

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

Isabel Paterson
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.

Isabel Paterson
What the past shows, by overwhelming evidence, is that the imponderables outweigh every material article in the scales of human endeavor.

Isabel Paterson
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.

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

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

Isabel Paterson
These are not sentimental considerations; they constitute the mechanism of production and therefore of power. Personal liberty is the pre-condition of the release of energy. Private property is the inductor which initiates the flow. Real money is the transmission line; and the payment of debts comprises half the circuit. An empire is merely a long circuit energy-system. The possibility of a short circuit, ensuing leakage and breakdown or explosion, occurs in the hook-up of political organization to the productive processes. This is not a figure os speech or analogy, but a specific physical description of what happens.

Isabel Paterson
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?

Isabel Paterson
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.

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

Isabel Paterson