Top 150 Henry Hazlitt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The notion that we can dismiss the views of all previous thinkers surely leaves no basis for the hope that our own work will prove of any value to others.”

— Henry Hazlitt

52. “A Day never passes without some ardent reformer or group of reformers suggesting some new government intervention, some new statist scheme to fill some alleged ‘need’ or relieve some alleged distress.”

— Henry Hazlitt

53. “The only way government bureaucrats know of keeping prosperity going is to inflate some more – to increase the deficit or to pump more money into the system.”

— Henry Hazlitt

54. “No one could think that the destruction of war was an economic advantage who began by thinking first of all of the people whose property was destroyed. Those.”

— Henry Hazlitt

55. “It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it.”

— Henry Hazlitt

56. “No man burns down his own house on the theory that the need to rebuild it will stimulate his energies.”

— Henry Hazlitt

57. “It is exports that pay for imports, and vice versa. The greater exports we have, the greater imports we must have, if we ever expect to get paid.”

— Henry Hazlitt

58. “Once the idea is accepted that money is something whose supply is determined simply by the printing press, it becomes impossible for the politicians in power to resist the constant demands for further inflation.”

— Henry Hazlitt

59. “You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation.”

— Henry Hazlitt

60. “The sad fact is that today most of the heads of big businesses in America have become so confused or intimidated that, so far from carrying the free market to argument to the enemy, they fail to defend themselves adequately even when attacked.”

— Henry Hazlitt

61. “Government-to-government aid rests on socialistic assumptions and promotes socialism and stagnation, whereas private foreign investment rest on capitalist assumptions and promotes private enterprise and maximum economic growth.”

— Henry Hazlitt

62. “Capitalism will continue to eliminate mass poverty in more and more places and to an increasingly marked extent if it is merely permitted to do so.”

— Henry Hazlitt

63. “Economic progress and justice do not consist in superbly equalized destitution, but in the constant creation of more and more goods and services, of more and more wealth and income to be shared.”

— Henry Hazlitt

64. “ECONOMICS, as we have now seen again and again, is a science of recognizing secondary consequences. It is also a science of seeing general consequences. It is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some special interest in the short run, but on the general interest in the long run.”

— Henry Hazlitt

65. “Diluting the money supply with paper is the moral equivalent of diluting the milk supply with water.”

— Henry Hazlitt

66. “The way to get a maximum rate of ‘economic growth’ assuming this to be our aim – is to give maximum encouragement to production, employment, saving, and investment. And the way to do this is to maintain a free market and a sound currency.”

— Henry Hazlitt

67. “Rent control, however, encourages wasteful use of space.”

— Henry Hazlitt

68. “There is no limit to the amount of work to be done as long as any human need or wish that work could fill remains unsatisfied.”

— Henry Hazlitt

69. “There is no more certain way to deter employment than to harass and penalize employers. There is no more certain way to keep wages low than to destroy every incentive to investment in new and more efficient machines and equipment.”

— Henry Hazlitt

70. “Bureaucrats denounce private enterprise for the consequences of their own reckless policies and demand still more governmental controls.”

— Henry Hazlitt

71. “There is actually no limit to the amount of work to be done. Work creates work. What A produces constitutes the demand for what B produces.”

— Henry Hazlitt

72. “Who subsidizes the consumers will depend upon the incidence of taxation. But men in their role of taxpayers will be subsidizing themselves in their role of consumers. It becomes a little difficult to trace in this maze precisely who is subsidizing whom. What is forgotten is that subsidies are paid for by someone, and that no method has been discovered by which the community gets something for nothing.”

— Henry Hazlitt

73. “The system of capitalism, of the market economy, is a system of freedom, of justice, of productivity. But these three virtues cannot be separated. Each flows out of the other.”

— Henry Hazlitt

74. “Prices are determined by supply and demand, and demand is determined by how intensely people want a commodity and what they have to offer in exchange for it.”

— Henry Hazlitt

75. “For as Alexander Hamilton pointed out in the Federalist Papers nearly two centuries ago, “A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”

— Henry Hazlitt

76. “The more war destroys, the more it impoverishes, the greater is the postwar need. Indubitably. But need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.”

— Henry Hazlitt

77. “When each of us is free to work out his own economic destiny, within the framework of the market economy, the institution of private property, and the general rule of law, we will all improve our economic condition much faster than when we are ordered around by bureaucrats.”

— Henry Hazlitt

78. “The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise, the restoration of incentives, to let loose the tremendous constructive energies of 300 million Americans.”

— Henry Hazlitt

79. “Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’”

— Henry Hazlitt

80. “Proposals for an increased volume of credit, therefore, are merely another name for proposals for an increased burden of debt. They would seem considerably less inviting if they were habitually referred to by the second name instead of by the first.”

— Henry Hazlitt

81. “More and more people are becoming aware that government has nothing to give them without first taking it away from somebody else-or from themselves. Increased handouts to selected groups mean merely increased taxes, or increased deficits and increased inflation.”

— Henry Hazlitt

82. “It is typical of government price-fixing schemes that they escape one undesired consequence only by plunging into another and usually worse one.”

— Henry Hazlitt

83. “The surest way for a poor nation to stay poor is to harass, hobble, and straitjacket private enterprise or to discourage or destroy it by subsidized government competition, oppressive taxation, or outright expropriation.”

— Henry Hazlitt

84. “The more ‘adequate’ we make relief, the more people we are going to find willing to get on it and stay on it indefinitely. The more we try to make sure that everybody really in need of relief gets it, the more certain we can be that we are also giving it to people who neither need nor deserve it.”

— Henry Hazlitt

85. “The simple truth is that there is an optimum rate of replacement, a best time for replacement. It would be an advantage for a manufacturer to have his factory and equipment destroyed by bombs only if the time had arrived when, through deterioration and obsolescence, his plant and equipment had already acquired a null or a negative value and the bombs fell just when he should have called in a wrecking crew or ordered new equipment anyway.”

— Henry Hazlitt

86. “There is no more certain way to deter employment than to harass and penalize employers.”

— Henry Hazlitt

87. “A little philosophy inclineth men’s minds to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

— Henry Hazlitt

88. “Each of us must also sell something, even if for most of us it is our own services rather than goods, in order to get the purchasing power to buy.”

— Henry Hazlitt

89. “It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths.”

— Henry Hazlitt

90. “In order that one industry might grow or come into existence, a hundred other industries would have to shrink.”

— Henry Hazlitt

91. “The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.”

— Henry Hazlitt

92. “In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest.”

— Henry Hazlitt

93. “The “virtue” of Keynes’s teaching is that it praised thriftlessness, reckless spending, and unbalanced budgets and was therefore extremely palatable to the politicians in power.”

— Henry Hazlitt

94. “Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing army of pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a halt – and quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become.”

— Henry Hazlitt

95. “The army of relief and other subsidy recipients will continue to grow, and the solvency of the government will become increasingly un tenable, as long as part of the population can vote to force the other part to support it.”

— Henry Hazlitt

96. “The best wage rates for labor are not the highest wage rates, but the wage rates that permit full production, full employment and the largest sustained payrolls.”

— Henry Hazlitt

97. “The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.”

— Henry Hazlitt

98. “It has been frequently said that many of the world’s greatest inventions were due to accident. In a sense this is true. But the accident was prepared for by previous hard thinking. It would never have occurred had not this thinking taken place.”

— Henry Hazlitt

99. “Many of the most frequent fallacies in economic reasoning come from the propensity, especially marked today, to think in terms of an abstraction – the collectivity, the “nation” – and to forget or ignore the individuals who make it up and give it meaning.”

— Henry Hazlitt

100. “Eternal vigilance is the price of an open mind.”

— Henry Hazlitt