Look around, and you see everywhere the exertions and acts of individuals restricted, regulated, or promoted, on the principle of the common welfare.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes how individual actions are influenced by the broader social good.
Friedrich List highlights the relationship between individual efforts and the collective welfare of society. He suggests that the behaviors and choices of individuals are not made in a vacuum; rather, they are shaped by societal principles that promote the common good. This reflects the interconnectedness of personal ambitions and societal responsibilities, urging us to recognize that our actions affect not only ourselves but also the community at large.
In practice
In a speech about social responsibility, one might say, 'As Friedrich List pointed out, our actions are shaped by the principle of common welfare.'
It is bad policy to regulate everything... where things may better regulate themselves and can be better promoted by private exertions; but it is no less bad policy to let those things alone which can only be promoted by interfering social power.
An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.
Industry entirely left to itself, would soon fall to ruin, and a nation letting everything alone would commit suicide.
Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.
What an awful thing life is, isnβt it? Itβs like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.
Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information. Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world.
The devil's most devilish when respectable.
An awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely.
In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being.
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