Top 150 Henry Hazlitt Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Inflation itself is a form of taxation.”

— Henry Hazlitt

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

122. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

132. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

134. “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

135. “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

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

— 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 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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

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

— 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. “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

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Henry Hazlitt

146. “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

147. “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

148. “Though the legislation follows the rise of the prevailing market wage rate, the myth continues to be built up that it is the minimum wage legislation that has raised the market wage.”

— Henry Hazlitt

149. “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

150. “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