Top 150 Henry Hazlitt Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: ‘Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.’ It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.”

— Henry Hazlitt

2. “The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of human liberty, which means the future of civilization.”

— Henry Hazlitt

3. “When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”

— Henry Hazlitt

4. “In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.”

— Henry Hazlitt

5. “The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from someone else.”

— Henry Hazlitt

6. “Inflation is a form of tax, a tax that we all collectively must pay.”

— Henry Hazlitt

7. “A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.”

— Henry Hazlitt

8. “Prolonged inflation never ‘stimulates’ the economy. On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.”

— Henry Hazlitt

9. “The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism – the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise.”

— Henry Hazlitt

10. “We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.”

— Henry Hazlitt

11. “Government can’t give us anything without depriving us of something else.”

— Henry Hazlitt

12. “If precious metals had been abundant, they would not have been precious.”

— Henry Hazlitt

13. “The great merit of gold is precisely that it is scarce; that its quantity is limited by nature; that it is costly to discover, to mine, and to process; and that it cannot be created by political fiat or caprice.”

— Henry Hazlitt

14. “If a government resorts to inflation, that is, creates money in order to cover its budget deficits or expands credit in order to stimulate business, then no power on earth, no gimmick, device, trick or even indexation can prevent its economic consequences.”

— Henry Hazlitt

15. “Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for.”

— Henry Hazlitt

16. “The real solution to the problem of poverty consists in finding how to increase the employment and earning power of the poor.”

— Henry Hazlitt

17. “The larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment. When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble.”

— Henry Hazlitt

18. “Mere inflation-that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices-may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.”

— Henry Hazlitt

19. “The essential function of the State is to maintain peace, justice, law, and order, and to protect the individual citizen against aggression, violence, theft, and fraud.”

— Henry Hazlitt

20. “Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself.”

— Henry Hazlitt

21. “A vital function of the free market is to penalize inefficiency and misjudgment and to reward efficiency and good judgment. By distorting economic calculations and creating illusory profits, inflation will destroy this function.”

— Henry Hazlitt

22. “Relief, or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is never the true solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift, which may mask the disease and mitigate the pain, but provides no basic cure.”

— Henry Hazlitt

23. “Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment.”

— Henry Hazlitt

24. “What inflation really does is to change the relationships of prices and costs.”

— Henry Hazlitt

25. “Inflation makes the extension of socialism possible by providing the financial chaos in which it flourishes. The fact is that socialism and inflation are cause and effect, they feed on each other!”

— Henry Hazlitt

26. “Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.”

— Henry Hazlitt

27. “If there is to be no loss whatever of dignity or self-respect in getting and staying on relief, then there can be no gain in dignity or self-respect in makings some sacrifices to keep off.”

— Henry Hazlitt

28. “The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge. In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: ‘Yes, madam, everything’s going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you’ll carry coal.’”

— Henry Hazlitt

29. “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

— Henry Hazlitt

30. “Need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.”

— Henry Hazlitt

31. “The ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector.”

— Henry Hazlitt

32. “The only real cure for poverty is production.”

— Henry Hazlitt

33. “Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man.”

— Henry Hazlitt

34. “The superior freedom of the capitalist system, its superior justice, and its superior productivity are not three superiorities, but one. The justice follows from the freedom and the productivity follows from the freedom and the justice.”

— Henry Hazlitt

35. “It is possible to increase paper-money income to any amount by debasing the currency. But real income can only be increased by working harder or more efficiently, saving more, investing more, and producing more.”

— Henry Hazlitt

36. “The progress of civilization has meant the reduction of employment, not its increase. It is because we have become increasingly wealthy as a nation that we have been able virtually to eliminate child labor, to remove the necessity of work for many of the aged and to make it unnecessary for millions of women to take jobs.”

— Henry Hazlitt

37. “Government provided free tuition tends more and more to produce a uniform conformist education, with college faculties ultimately dependent for their jobs on the government, and so developing an economic interest in profession and teaching a statist, pro-government, and socialist ideology.”

— Henry Hazlitt

38. “The envious are more likely to be mollified by seeing others deprived of some advantage than by gaining it for themselves. It is not what they lack that chiefly troubles them, but what others have.”

— Henry Hazlitt

39. “Even a relatively mild inflation distorts the structure of production. It leads to the overexpansion of some industries at the expense of others. This involves a misapplication and waste of capital. When the inflation collapses, or is brought to a halt, the misdirected capital investment – whether in the form of machines, factories or office buildings – cannot yield an adequate return and loses the greater part of its value.”

— Henry Hazlitt

40. “From a strictly economic point of view, buying gold in a major inflation and holding it probably presents the least risk of capital loss of any investment or speculation.”

— Henry Hazlitt

41. “Therefore, for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else.”

— Henry Hazlitt

42. “Taxation for public housing destroys as many jobs in other lines as it creates in housing.”

— Henry Hazlitt

43. “The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the “new” economics, is to concentrate on the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole.”

— Henry Hazlitt

44. “Short-sighted and impatient efforts to wipe out poverty by severing the connection between effort and reward can only lead to the growth of a totalitarian state, and destroy the economic progress that this country has so dearly bought.”

— Henry Hazlitt

45. “The function of profits, finally, is to put constant and unremitting pressure on the head of every competitive business to introduce further economies and efficiencies, no matter to what stage these may already have been brought.”

— Henry Hazlitt

46. “Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.”

— Henry Hazlitt

47. “Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the now practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is any problem of any kind to be solved, government is the agency to step in and solve it.”

— Henry Hazlitt

48. “When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists.”

— Henry Hazlitt

49. “A certain amount of taxes is of course indispensable to carry on essential government functions. Reasonable taxes for this purpose need not hurt production much.”

— Henry Hazlitt

50. “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family,” said Adam Smith’s strong common sense in reply to the sophists of his time, “can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

— Henry Hazlitt