Clergyman's

Self-promotion is self-defeating. No matter how brilliant an individual, one becomes instinctively ""leery"" when he toots his own horn.
- Leonard E. Read

Self-promotion is self-defeating. No matter how brilliant an individual, one becomes instinctively ""leery"" when he toots his own horn.
- Leonard E. Read

I have never met a single European who had a clean, clear-cut understanding of the principles of strictly limited government.
- Leonard E. Read

I have never met a single European who had a clean, clear-cut understanding of the principles of strictly limited government.
- Leonard E. Read

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.
- Leonard E. Read

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.
- Leonard E. Read

The distinction between individuals is not to be found in self-interest. It is to be found in the degree of intelligence they apply in interpreting their self-interest. The ""selfless"" one, in the name of doing good, charity, and sacrifice, is not intelligent enough to see that his greatest contribution to others would be his own evolution, presenting society with a more perfect person. The intelligent one knows that his value to others is identical with value to self, and that this value rests on the extent of his perfection, the extent that he excels, the extent that he has something over and above which can be drawn on by others.
- Leonard E. Read

Socialism is founded on a lie -- the premise that man knows more than he in fact does know.
- Leonard E. Read

Why do tourists gape so eagerly at this sort of thing ? Most people, I believe, aspire to what these agents and sycophants of the state achieved: ease without work, services for themselves by edict, power and position by wishing plus, of course, a little intrigue.
- Leonard E. Read

The more complex our economy, the more we should rely on the miraculous, self-adapting processes of men acting freely. No mind of man nor any combination of minds can even envision, let alone intelligently control, the countless human energy exchanges in a simple society, to say nothing of a complex one.
- Leonard E. Read