In spite of the great importance in our national life of the efforts and ingenuity of unusual individuals, the people in the mass have inevitably helped to make large fortunes possible.

Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.

Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.

The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.

Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.