Top 150 Henry Hazlitt Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano.”

— Henry Hazlitt

102. “New taxes are so unpopular that most ‘social’ handout schemes are originally enacted without enough increased taxation to pay for them. The result is chronic government deficits, paid for by the issuance of additional paper money.”

— Henry Hazlitt

103. “What men do not know about they take for granted. Knowledge furnishes problems, and the discovery of problems itself constitutes an intellectual advance.”

— Henry Hazlitt

104. “There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy.”

— Henry Hazlitt

105. “The government never lends or gives anything to business that it does not take away from business.”

— Henry Hazlitt

106. “What a commodity has cost to produce in the past cannot determine its value. That will depend on the present relationship of supply and demand.”

— Henry Hazlitt

107. “Would-be income guarantors ignore or despise the capitalistic system that makes their dreams dreamable and gives their redistribute-the-income proposals whatever plausibility they have.”

— Henry Hazlitt

108. “For every alleged benefit that the politicians confer upon us, they must necessarily deprive us of something else.”

— Henry Hazlitt

109. “Saving” in short, in the modern world, is only another form of spending.”

— Henry Hazlitt

110. “The more things a government undertakes to do, the fewer things it can do completely. When the government tries to do everything it must do everything badly.”

— Henry Hazlitt

111. “The typical political ploy was to load up benefits in the present and push costs into the future. Yet that future always arrived;.”

— Henry Hazlitt

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

125. “Inflation itself is a form of taxation.”

— Henry Hazlitt

126. “The volume is therefore primarily one of exposition. It makes no claim to originality with regard to any of the chief ideas that it expounds. Rather its effort is to show that many of 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

127. “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

128. “The thing so great that “private capital could not have built it” has in fact been built by private capital – the capital that was expropriated in taxes.”

— Henry Hazlitt

129. “The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.”

— Henry Hazlitt

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130. “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. He has it, perhaps, because he already has marketable assets of a greater cash value than the loan for which he is asking. Or he has it because his character and past record have earned it. He brings it into the bank with him. That is why the banker makes him the loan. The banker is not giving something for nothing.”

— Henry Hazlitt

131. “So government policy should be directed, not to imposing more burdensome requirements on employers, but to following policies that encourage profits, that encourage employers to expand, to invest in newer and better machines to increase the productivity of workers –.”

— Henry Hazlitt

132. “Real wealth, of course, consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in.”

— Henry Hazlitt

133. “And in terms of welfare, of course, the loss suffered will be much greater than the loss in merely arithmetical terms, because the psychological losses of those who are unemployed will greatly outweigh the psychological gains of those with a slightly higher income in terms of purchasing power.”

— Henry Hazlitt

134. “Reasonable taxes for this purpose need not hurt production much. The kind of government services then supplied in return, which among other things safeguard production itself, more than compensate for this. But the larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment.”

— Henry Hazlitt

135. “A hundred welfare programs, spending more and more billions, lead to chronic budget deficits, which lead to increased paper-money issues, which lead to higher prices.”

— Henry Hazlitt

136. “There will not be a “surplus” of capital until the most backward country is as well equipped technologically as the most advanced, until the most inefficient factory in America is brought abreast of the factory with the latest and finest equipment, and until the most modern tools of production have reached a point where human ingenuity is at a dead end, and can improve them no further. As long as any of these conditions remains unfulfilled, there will be indefinite room for more capital.”

— Henry Hazlitt

137. “Modern capitalism benefited the masses in a double way – both by greatly increasing the wages of the masses of workers and greatly reducing the real prices they had to pay for what was produced.”

— Henry Hazlitt

138. “The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been to increase at an exponential rate.”

— Henry Hazlitt

139. “One of the worst results of the retention of the Keynesian myths is that it not only promotes greater and greater inflation, but that it systematically diverts attention from the real causes of our unemployment, such as excessive union wage-rates, minimum wage laws, excessive and prolonged unemployment insurance, and overgenerous relief payments.”

— Henry Hazlitt

140. “The idea that an expanding economy implies that all industries must be simultaneously expanding is a profound error.”

— Henry Hazlitt

141. “One of the worst features of all the plans for sharing wealth and equalizing or guaranteeing incomes is that they lose sight of the conditions and institution s that are necessary to create wealth and income in the first place.”

— Henry Hazlitt

142. “What is put into the hands of B cannot be put into the hands of A.”

— Henry Hazlitt

143. “Up to a certain point it is necessary to produce shoes. But it is also necessary to produce coats, shirts, trousers, homes, plows, shovels, factories, bridges, milk and bread. It would be idiotic to go on piling up mountains of surplus shoes, simply because we could do it, while hundreds of more urgent needs went unfilled.”

— Henry Hazlitt

144. “So the government launches on a gigantic housing program – at the taxpayers’ expense.”

— Henry Hazlitt

145. “When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that this additional money must be seized from Peter.”

— Henry Hazlitt

146. “If we look at it now from the consumer’s point of view, we find that he can buy less with his money. Because he has to pay more for sweaters and other protected goods, he can buy less of everything else. The general purchasing power of his income has therefore been reduced.”

— Henry Hazlitt

147. “In sum, so far as the politicians are concerned, the lesson that this book tried to instill more than thirty years ago does not seem to have been learned anywhere.”

— Henry Hazlitt

148. “For it is the very commodities selected for maximum price-fixing that the regulators most want to keep in abundant supply. But when they limit the wages and the profits of those who make these commodities, without also limiting the wages and profits of those who make luxuries or semiluxuries, they discourage the production of the price-controlled necessities while they relatively stimulate the production of less essential goods.”

— Henry Hazlitt

149. “Functional prices are those that encourage the largest volume of production and the largest volume of sales. Functional wages are those that tend to bring about the highest volume of employment and the largest real payrolls.”

— Henry Hazlitt

150. “Libertarians are learning to their sorrow that big businessmen cannot necessarily be relied upon to be their allies in the battle against extension of governmental encroachments.”

— Henry Hazlitt