John Atkinson Hobson Quotes

Higher progress can only be purchased by an economy of the work of lower progress, the free, conscious expression of higher individuality by the routine subordination of lower individuality.

[T]he tendency of growing civilisation on the national scale has been more and more to divert the struggle for life from a struggle with other nations to a struggle with environment, and so to utilise the fruits of reason as to divert a larger and larger proportion of energy to struggles for intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods rather than for goods which tax the powers of the earth, and which, conforming to the law of diminishing returns, are apt to bring them into conflict with other nations.

Is it not the larger and the longer hope and interest of America to live as a great partner in... a society of nations, rather than to live a life of isolated prosperity... ?

Envisaging the whole range of foreign commerce... the image of it as a prize which governments can, and ought to win for their traders at the expense of the traders supported by other governments, has been a most fertile source of international misunderstanding.

This is, in fact, the philosophical defence of progressive socialism, that human progress requires that one after another the lower material animal functions shall be reduced to routine, in order that a larger amount of individual effort may be devoted to the exercise of higher functions and the cultivation by strife of higher qualities.

If the interests of consumers and the interests of producers weighed equally in the eyes of governments, as they should, the strongest of all obstacles to a peaceful harmonious society of nations would be overcome. For the suspicions, jealousies, and hostilities of nations are inspired more by the tendency of groups of producers to misrepresent their private interests as the good of their respective countries than by any other single circumstance.

We now stand face to face with the main objection so often raised against all endeavours to remedy industrial and social diseases by the expansion of public control. ...The strife, danger, and waste of industrial competition are necessary conditions to industrial vitality.

[T]he instinct for control of land, drives back to the earliest times when a wide range of land was necessary for a food supply for men or cattle, and is linked on to the "trek" habit, which survives more powerfully than is commonly supposed in civilised peoples. ... The animal lust of struggle, once a necessity, survives in the blood.

The substitution of industrialism for warfare is not... understood to imply a diminution of individual enterprise, but an alteration in its application.

History does not show greed of gain as the motive of the great steps in industrial progress. The love of science, the pure delight of mechanical invention, the attainment of some slight personal convenience in labour, and mere chance, play the largest part in the history of industrial improvements. These motives would be as equally operative under state-control as under private enterprise.

Economic nationalism means protective and discriminative tariffs, and a conservation of national, imperial or allied resources within a circle of favored beneficiaries.

On what a slippery slope ...international morality reposes.

It is untrue that the world market is strictly limited, with the consequence that every advance of one group of traders is at the expense of another group. The world market is indefinitely expansible and is always expanding...

The imputation of political significance to... statistics, taken either in aggregate or in relation to separate countries, as if they were themselves indices of public gain or public loss, has most injurious reactions upon the intelligent understanding of commerce.

As nations advance towards civilisation it becomes less needful for them to contend with one another for land and food to support their increasing numbers, because their increased control of the industrial arts enables them to gain what they want by conquering nature instead of conquering their fellow-men.