Enterprise Quotes - Page 10

• Contrary to received wisdom, the British are not an insular people in the conventional sense - far from it. For most of their early modern and modern history, they have had more contact with more parts of the world than almost any other nation - it is just that this contact has regularly taken the form of aggressive military and commercial enterprise.

  Linda Colley

  Military, Taken, People

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.8, Yale University Press

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• Nations, as well as man, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years. When I contemplate the ardour with which the Anglo-Americans prosecute commercial enterprise, the advantages which befriend them, and the success of their undertakings, I cannot refrain from believing that they will one day become the first maritime power of the globe. They are born to rule the seas, as the Romans were to conquer the world.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Believe, Destiny, Men

  Alexis de Tocqueville (1835). “Democracy in America”, p.447

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• All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists' ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Law

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• We know that the only alternative to private competition is government monopoly of enterprise. We know that when government monopolizes production, distribution, and employment, it is no longer the servant of men - it is their master. And, therefore, we know that economic liberty and political liberty are inseparable parts of the same ball of wax - that we must keep them both, or we shall lose them both.

  Benjamin Franklin Fairless

  Wisdom, Men, Political

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• The paramount problem... is how to make this new form of property ownership a workable agent toward repeopleizing the proprietorship of the country's industries. Open to the wage-earner of the country the road to proprietorship... not as a gratuity, but as their proper allotment out of the combined forces that have made the enterprise successful.

  Peter S. Grosscup

  Country, Successful, Agents

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• We preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn't pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 percent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20c on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe.

  Nicholas von Hoffman

  Wisdom, Jobs, War

  Nicholas Von Hoffman (1970). “Left at the post”, Crown

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• The schemes to set up blacks in cleaning stores, gas stations, hamburger stands and fried-chicken franchises, all the low-profit, low-capital enterprises, will rivet the Black man to the least remunerative section of the economy forever. The best such prospects offer are the dissatisfactions of blue-collar life. The big money ain't in pumping rationed gas in an Amoco station leased in your very own name, but in having stock in Exxon.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Men, Blue

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• When incentive to acquire and obtain property is gone, people no longer make efforts to acquire any... Those who infringe upon property rights commit an injustice... If this occurs repeatedly, all incentives to cultural enterprise are destroyed and they cease utterly to make an effort. This leads to destruction and ruin of civilization.

  Ibn Khaldun

  Wisdom, Rights, Civilization

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• Free enterprise is a natural result of the American form of government, which says in so many words that the more men do for themselves, the less government does for them, the better off we will all be.

  Felix Morley

  Wisdom, Men, Doe

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• We hold that the ownership of private property is the right and privilege of every American citizen and is one of the foundation stones upon which this nation and its free enterprise system has been built and has prospered. We feel that private property rights and human rights are inseparable and indivisible. Only in those nations that guarantee the right of ownership of private property as basic and sacred under their law is there any recognition of human rights.

  John Rarick

  Wisdom, Rights, Law

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• Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed. And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of the country. The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.

  Ronald Reagan

  Country, Wisdom, Father

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• Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on their backs?

  Ronald Reagan

  Wisdom, Hands, Majority

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• A program whose basic thesis is, not that the system of free enterprise for profit has failed in this generation, but that it has not yet been tried!

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Wisdom, This Generation, Generations

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• The basic struggle today is not between individualism and collectivism, free enterprise and socialism, democracy and dictatorship. These are only the superficial manifestations of a deeper struggle which is moral and spiritual and involves above all else whether man shall exist for the state, or the state for man, and whether freedom is of the spirit or a concession of a materialized society.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Struggle

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• The libertarian good society lies... in the maximum dispersion of property compatible with effective production or, as process, in progressive reconciliation of conflicts between equality and efficiency. Such process involves increasing dispersion both of wealth among persons and families and of proximate productional control among enterprises or firms.

  Henry Calvert Simons

  Wisdom, Lying, Politics

  Henry Calvert Simons (1948). “Economic Policy for a Free Society”

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• If one examines the American idea of freedom, the individual, free enterprise, their Constitution, their political and economic structures as well as their mode of exploiting their natural resources, all these are shrouded in the idea of justice.

  Ndabaningi Sithole

  Ideas, Justice, Political

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• For the majority of Americans, collectivist or nationalized economy is morally wrong and therefore unjust. For them, free enterprise meets their keen sense of justice.

  Ndabaningi Sithole

  Wisdom, Justice, Majority

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• We very much hope that as we get growth that we can reduce the burden of taxation, that we can reduce income tax and increase the amount of genuine free enterprise and business enterprise... This is going... toward the restoration of the personal responsibility, the independence, with every man a property owner, every man a capitalist.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Wisdom, Responsibility, Men

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• As I see it, creative achievement is the very heart of the human enterprise... The destiny of man, of all men and of each man, is that he is condemned to invent what he will be - condemned if he is fearful but blessed if he welcomes the great adventure. We are responsible in the last analysis, not simply for what we are, but for what we will become; and that is a source of either high excitement or distress.

  Paul Kurtz

  Blessed, Adventure, Heart

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• As for Christianity's alleged concern with truth, Christian faith is to free inquiry what the Mafia is to free enterprise. Christianity may be represented as a competitor in the realm of ideas to be considered on the basis of its merits, but this is mere disguise. Like the Mafia, if Christianity fails to defeat its competition by legitimate means (which is a forgone conclusion), it resorts to strong-arm tactics. Have faith or be damned - this biblical doctrine alone is enough to exclude Christianity from the domain of reason.

  George H. Smith

  Christian, Strong, Mean

  George H. Smith (1974). “Atheism: The Case Against God”

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• What the Democrats have to understand is that while we do need to reform our regulation and we do need more restrictions, it is true that it is capitalism and free enterprise and companies that create jobs and wealth for every American.

  Michael Bloomberg

  Jobs, Reform, Needs

  Interview with Tom Brokaw, www.nbcnews.com. September 21, 2008.

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• Our example - and commitment - to freedom has changed the world. But along with the genius of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights, is the equal genius of our economic system. Our Founding Fathers endeavored to create a moral and just society like no other in history, and out of that grew a moral and just economic system the likes of which the world had never seen. Our freedom, what it means to be an American, has been defined and sustained by the liberating power of the free enterprise system.

  Mitt Romney

  Father, Mean, Commitment

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• Plain experience and common sense inform us that no abstract Person can have made us as we are without also wishing to delete us and start over (Gen. 8:21; Zeph. 1:2). Therefore, the existence of cruel and arbitrary nature, together with the universality of human sin, prevents us from beginning the theological enterprise with any concept of God that is distinct from revelation. All theologies of a cosmic harmonic principle shipwreck on the truths of tragedy, catastrophe, and injustice.

  Paul F. M. Zahl

  Common Sense, Starting Over, Together

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• The enterprise of America precedes that of Europe, as the industry of England precedes that of the rest of Europe.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Europe, America, England

  Benjamin Disraeli, Edmund Gosse, Robert Arnot (1904). “The works of Benjamin Disraeli, earl of Beaconsfield: embracing novels, romances, plays, poems, biography, short stories and great speeches”

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• All inconsiderate enterprises are impetuous at first, but soon lanquish.
  [Lat., Omnia inconsulti impetus coepta, initiis valida, spatio languescunt.]

  Tacitus

  Business, Firsts, Inconsiderate

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