Top 35 Isabel Paterson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.”

— Isabel Paterson

2. “Freedom is dangerous. Possibly crawling on all fours might be safer than standing upright, but we like the view better up there.”

— Isabel Paterson

3. “The craving for power is in itself a sign of inferior abilities and unfitness for responsibility.”

— Isabel Paterson

4. “Production is profit; and profit is production. They are not merely related; they are the same thing. When a man plants potatoes, if he does not get back more than he put in, he has produced nothing.”

— Isabel Paterson

5. “Now the sole remedy for the abuse of political power is to limit it; but when politics corrupt business, modern reformers invariably demand the enlargement of the political power.”

— Isabel Paterson

6. “The biggest pests are the people who use altruism as an alibi. What they passionately wish is to make themselves important.”

— Isabel Paterson

7. “Right now it is a terrible thing to be a rugged individualist; but we don’t know what else to be except a feeble nonentity.”

— Isabel Paterson

8. “The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people.”

— Isabel Paterson

9. “A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.”

— Isabel Paterson

10. “The great truth is that women actually like men, and men can never believe it.”

— Isabel Paterson

11. “The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others.”

— Isabel Paterson

12. “There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.”

— Isabel Paterson

13. “The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.”

— Isabel Paterson

14. “The objection to profit is as if a bystander, observing the planter digging his crop, should say: “You put in only one potato and you are taking out a dozen. You must have taken them away from someone else; those extra potatoes cannot be yours by right.” If profit is denounced, it must be assumed that running at a loss is admirable. On the contrary, that is what requires justification. Profit is self-justifying.”

— Isabel Paterson

15. “If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress.”

— Isabel Paterson

16. “Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?”

— Isabel Paterson

17. “Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure.”

— Isabel Paterson

18. “People mostly do as they like, and that would be fine if they’d let other people do the same.”

— Isabel Paterson

19. “If Charles F. Kettering or Thomas Alva Edison or Henry Ford had been put to work digging ditches under duress, one could calculate approximately how much energy or work could have been got out of them. Left to their own devices, as they were, it is impossible to say how much energy they actually released into production.”

— Isabel Paterson

20. “Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse or omission.”

— Isabel Paterson

21. “The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race.”

— Isabel Paterson

22. “If there were just one gift you could choose, but nothing barred, what would it be? We wish you then your own wish; you name it. Ours is liberty, now and forever.”

— Isabel Paterson

23. “As freak legislation, the antitrust laws stand alone. Nobody knows what it is they forbid.”

— Isabel Paterson

24. “The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.”

— Isabel Paterson

25. “No law can give power to private persons; every law transfers power from private persons to government.”

— Isabel Paterson

26. “Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.”

— Isabel Paterson

27. “Fear and want are subjective; and poverty is the absence of wealth. If it were promised that from the hour of his birth no man should ever again stand in his naked skin, who is to produce the clothes? who is to have such absolute power over every person? The only condition in which no one can experience poverty, want, or fear, is that of rigor mortis. The dead neither want nor fear.”

— Isabel Paterson

28. “An army is a diversion of energy from the productive life of a nation.”

— Isabel Paterson

29. “It takes the best part of a lifetime to find out what you don’t want.”

— Isabel Paterson

30. “An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea.”

— Isabel Paterson

31. “The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.”

— Isabel Paterson

32. “Leadership is obliged to justify itself daily.”

— Isabel Paterson

33. “Not uncommonly one hears some romantic young woman say, ‘Oh, I would give anything to be a writer.’ But she would not; and ‘anything’ is not enough. One must give everything.”

— Isabel Paterson

34. “Another “advanced” educational method does not mark examination papers for their accuracy; instead, grades are given indicating that the child has done well in relation to his capacities. That is, the teacher assumes divine omniscience, and pretends to know the child’s innate capacities absolutely, by some supernal means, instead of judging the specific result of a specific examination.”

— Isabel Paterson

35. “If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.”

— Isabel Paterson

36. “As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.”

— Isabel Paterson

37. “One genius is about all a house will hold.”

— Isabel Paterson