I have always said, that, without commerce...this island could not possibly continue to be great...but, it is the system of rendering every thing commercial; of making merchants and bankers into Lords; of making a set of fund-dealers the distributors of honours and rewards...it is this system that I reprobate.

He <nowiki>[</nowiki>Lord George Bentinck<nowiki>]</nowiki> dwelt much on the vicissitudes which must attend all merely foreign trade, which, though it should be encouraged, ought not to be solely relied on, as was the fashion of this day. Looking upon war as occasionally inevitable, he thought a commercial system based upon the presumption of perpetual peace to be full of ruin. His policy was essentially imperial and not cosmopolitan.

An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

There was something fundamentally wrong with our economic system. It was based upon injustice and could not last.

Indeed, it would have been impossible for me to have supported a Corn Law as a part of a great system of national policy intended to give uniform and universal protection to native industry, because over and over again I have laid down the opposite principle with reference to protection; and I have shared year after year in measures and arguments, the object of which was to break in the principle of what is called protection to British industry, and to get rid, as speedily as circumstances would permit, first of prohibition, and then of protection, which I have always held to be injurious not only to the country generally, but ultimately to the very interests which it is designed to serve.

C'est le mythe du commerce comme fin en soi, de l'homme fait pour le commerce et non l'inverse, qui a fait dépérir l'art, et tout l'appareillage de fortune auquel on a eu recours pour la mise en pratique de ce principe erroné. Les machines, les chemins de fer et le reste qui nous dominent tous à présent, auraient pu rester sous notre contrôle si nous n'avions pas décidé de rechercher le profit et une activité coûte que coûte, en instaurant quelque temps cette anarchie corrumpue et corruptrice qui a usurpé le nom de société.

[H]is (Mr. Bright's) own opinions had always been very adverse to maintaining an armed squadron for the suppression of the slave trade.

He was sure there must be some catch. Every principle here had an opposite, and both were wrong.

He was very suspicious of inventions, for they always meant that some rule would have to be broken.

The root of all evil, the liberal insists, was precisely this interference with the freedom of employment, trade and currencies practiced by the various schools of social, national, and monopolistic protectionism since the third quarter of the nineteenth century; but for the unholy alliance of trade unions and labor parties with monopolistic manufacturers and agrarian interests, which in their shortsighted greed joined forces to frustrate economic liberty, the world would be enjoying today the fruits of an almost automatic system of creating material welfare. Liberal leaders never weary of repeating that the tragedy of the nineteenth century sprang from the incapacity of man to remain faithful to the inspiration of the early liberals; that the generous initiative of our ancestors was frustrated by the passions of nationalism and class war, vested interests, and monopolists, and above all, by the blindness of the working people to the ultimate beneficence of unrestricted economic freedom to all human interests, including their own. A great intellectual and moral advance was thus, it is claimed; frustrated by the intellectual and moral weaknesses of the mass of the people; what the spirit of Enlightenment had achieved was put to nought by the forces of selfishness. In a nutshell this is the economic liberal’s defense. Unless it is refuted, he will continue to hold the floor in the contest of arguments.

Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hardwired at inception.

He was opposed on principle to an Established Church.

his principles could not be made to agree with that constitution and order which God had settled in the world,

The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.