“Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century's "hidden hand" than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.”

— John James Cowperthwaite

March 30, 1962, page 133.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

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John James Cowperthwaite 38

British colonial administrator 1915–2006

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

March 24, 1966, page 215.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

“The etude is a Romantic idea. It appeared in the early nineteenth century as a new genre: a short piece in which the musical interest is derived almost entirely from a single technical problem. A mechanical difficulty directly produces the music, its charm, and its pathos. Beauty and technique are united, but the creative stimulus is the hand, with its arrangement of muscles and tendons, its idiosyncratic shape.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 6 : Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

“Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.”

William McKinley (1843–1901) American politician, 25th president of the United States (in office from 1897 to 1901)

Speech delivered at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York (September 5, 1901).
1900s

“Isaacs has a cheap Bic pen in his hand. He runs his fingers down the shaft, inverts it, runs his fingers down the shaft, over and over, in a motion that is mechanical rather than impatient.”

J.M. Coetzee book Disgrace

Disgrace (1999)

“Although science claims the whole universe as its field... it confesses that its ignorance is more widely extended than its knowledge. In this very confession... it finds a safeguard for future progress. Science cannot... allow theologian or metaphysician... to the foreshore of our present ignorance, and so hinder the development in due time...”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“Growth and progress are related, for there is no resting place for an enterprise in a competitive economy.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 15 (2015 edition)

“No nineteenth-century writer could have written this nineteenth-century tale; but few twentieth-century writers could have handled its simplicities in the way this one does.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) Sicilian writer and prince

Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 30.
Criticism

“The distribution of wealth is one of today’s most widely discussed and controversial issues. But what do we really know about its evolution over the long term? Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced inequality and greater harmony among the classes, as Simon Kuznets thought in the twentieth century? What do we really know about how wealth and income have evolved since the eighteenth century, and what lessons can we derive from that knowledge for the century now under way?”

Thomas Piketty book Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Source: Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), p. 1 Introduction: Lead paragraph; Quoted in From the Introduction to Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/capital-in-the-twenty-first-century-introduction.html, at hup.harvard.edu, 2014.

“The enterprise of Adolf Hitler, with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

Statement after the start of World War II
"Witness to an Ancient Truth" (1962)

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event,—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century's "hidden hand" than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.”

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John James Cowperthwaite 38

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