Top 150 Henry Hazlitt Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

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

— Henry Hazlitt

83. “Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty.”

— Henry Hazlitt

84. “If, therefore, the X industry is driven out of existence by a minimum wage law, then the workers previously employed in that industry will be forced to turn to alternative courses that seemed less attractive to them in the first place.”

— Henry Hazlitt

85. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

87. “The proposal is frequently made that the government ought to assume the risks that are “too great for private industry.” This means that bureaucrats should be permitted to take risks with the tax payer’s money that no one is willing to take with his own.”

— Henry Hazlitt

88. “The interest rate is merely the special name for the price of loaned capital. It is a price like any other.”

— Henry Hazlitt

89. “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

90. “Just as there is no technical improvement that would not hurt someone, so there is no change in public taste or morals, even for the better, that would not hurt someone.”

— Henry Hazlitt

91. “If we try to run the economy for the benefit of a single group or class, we shall injure or destroy all groups, including the members of the very class for whose benefit we have been trying to run it. We must run the economy for everybody.”

— Henry Hazlitt

92. “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

93. “There is a strange idea abroad, held by all monetary cranks, that credit is something a banker gives to a man. Credit, on the contrary, is something a man already has.”

— Henry Hazlitt

94. “Contrary to a popular impression, profits are achieved not by raising prices, but by introducing economies and efficiencies that cut costs of production.”

— Henry Hazlitt

95. “Inflation itself is a form of taxation. It is perhaps the worst possible form, which usually bears hardest on those least able to pay.”

— Henry Hazlitt

96. “The same reasoning applies to civilian government officials whenever they are retained in excessive numbers and do not perform services for the community reasonably equivalent to the remuneration they receive.”

— Henry Hazlitt

97. “The long-run historical tendency of capitalism has not only been to increase real incomes more or less proportionately nearly all along the line, but to benefit the masses even more than the rich.”

— Henry Hazlitt

98. “Socialists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized destitution were preferable to “maldistributed” plenty. A national income that is rapidly growing in absolute terms for practically everyone will be deplored because it is making the rich richer.”

— Henry Hazlitt

99. “Full employment – very full employment; long, weary, back-breaking employment – is characteristic of precisely the nations that are most retarded industrially.”

— Henry Hazlitt

100. “The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. The world must be saved from its saviors. If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!”

— Henry Hazlitt