Friedrich List Quotes

"The relationship I have to my fatherland is like that of mothers with crippled children: they love them all the more, the more crippled they are. Germany is the background of all my plans, the return to Germany."
-Friedrich List

"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."
-Friedrich List

"The concentration and reciprocal effect of industry and agriculture conjoin in a growth of productive powers, which increases more in geometrical than in arithmetical proportion."
-Friedrich List

"Industry entirely left to itself, would soon fall to ruin, and a nation letting everything alone would commit suicide."
-Friedrich List

"Only now did I recognize the reciprocal relationship which exits between manufacturing power and the national system of transportation, and that the one can never develop to its fullest without the other."
-Friedrich List

"Look around, and you see everywhere the exertions and acts of individuals restricted, regulated, or promoted, on the principle of the common welfare."
-Friedrich List

"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."
-Friedrich List

"But the general welfare must restrict and regulate the exertions of the individuals, as the individuals must derive a supply of their strength from social power."
-Friedrich List