Historians From England

"The limit to the size of the firm is set where its costs of organizing a transaction become equal to the cost of carrying it out through the market. This determines what the firm buys, produces, and sells. As the concept of transaction costs is not usually used by economists, it is not surprising that an approach which incorporates it will find some difficulty in getting itself accepted. We can best understand this attitude if we consider not the firm but the market."

"In mainstream economic theory, the firm and the market are, for the most part, assumed to exist and are not themselves the subject of investigation. One result has been that the crucial role of the law in determining the activities carried out by the firm and in the market has been largely ignored."

"If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess."

"But a theory is not like an airline or bus timetable. We are not interested simply in the accuracy of its predictions. A theory also serves as a base for thinking. It helps us to understand what is going on by enabling us to organize our thoughts. Faced with a choice between a theory which predicts well but gives us little insight into how the system works and one which gives us this insight but predicts badly, I would choose the latter, and I am inclined to think that most economists would do the same."

"The question always is, will it pay to bring an extra exchange transaction under the organizing authority? At the margin, the costs of organizing within the firm will be equal either to the costs of organizing in another firm or to the costs involved in leaving the transaction to be “organised” by the price mechanism. Business men will be constantly experimenting, controlling more or less, and in this way equilibrium will be maintained. This gives the position of equilibrium for static analysis."

"Why... are there any market transactions at all? Why not all production carried on by one big firm?... First, as a firm gets larger, there may be decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function, that is, the costs of organizing additional transactions within the firm may rise... Second, it may be that as the transactions which are organized increase, the entrepreneur fails to place the factors of production in the uses where their value is greatest, that is, fails to make the best use of the factors of production... Finally, the supply price of one or more of the factors of production may rise, because the "other advantages" of a small firm are greater than those of a large firm."

"A firm consist of the system of relationships which comes into existence when the direction of resources is dependent on an entrepreneur."

"Outside the firm, price movements direct production, which is co-ordinated through a series of exchange transactions on the market. Within a firm, these market transactions are eliminated and in place of the complicated market structure with exchange transactions is substituted the entrepreneur-coordinator, who directs production. It is clear that these are alternative methods of coordinating production. Yet, having regard to the fact that, if production is regulated by price movements, production could be carried on without any organization at all might we ask, why is there any organization?"

"If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn't go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, "what would I do if I were a horse?""

"I can't remember [of a good regulation]. Regulation of transport, regulation of agriculture—agriculture is a, zoning is z. You know, you go from a to z, they are all bad. There were so many studies, and the result was quite universal: The effects were bad."

"In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics."

"Transaction costs were used in the one case to show that if they are not included in the analysis, the firm has no purpose, while in the other I showed, as I thought, that if transaction costs were not introduced into the analysis, for the range of problems considered, the law had no purpose."

"American institutionalists were not theoretical but anti-theoretical.... Without a theory they had nothing to pass on except a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory, or a fire."

"In my view, what is wanted in industrial organization is a direct approach to the problem. This would concentrate on what activities firms undertake, and would endeavor to discover the characteristics of the groupings of activities within firms. Which activities tend to be associated and which do not? The answer may well differ for different kinds of firm."

"The traditional approach has tended to obscure the nature of the choice that has to be made. The question is commonly thought of as one in which A inflicts harm on B and what has to be decided is: how should we restrain A? But this is wrong. We are dealing with a problem of a reciprocal nature. To avoid the harm to B would inflict harm on A. The real question that has to be decided is: should A be allowed to harm B or should B be allowed to harm A?"

"Muslims shared many of the deep-seated characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon elite—an intuitive resentment of culture, an amicable contempt for women, a proclivity for riding about on horses, a pleasure in discipline, and a covert homophilia."

"I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff "pieces", when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings."

"The new world will be a place of answers and no questions, because the only questions left will be answered by computers, because only computers will know what to ask."

"NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Where else but in Texas would men set up to administer space?"

"Much of my life seems in retrospect to have been spent in the company of putative national leaders passing through the process of being denounced and imprisoned for sedition, as part of the inevitable progression towards the Prime Ministership and the ritual tea-party at Windsor Castle."

"It was clumsy and cruel and thoughtless and without consideration. Step by step, the west blundered and floundered into a dilemma they never completely comprehended and never in fact sought: from the very beginning, they argued in cliches."

"I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living."

"When Nikita Khrushchev wrapped himself in the bloody mantle of the Czars he broke Hungary, he broke the little Communist parties over the western world, and he broke the hearts of many honest men who had trusted a little too far, a little too long."

"That worst evil of long dictatorships: the loss of all political experience."

"The fabulous Eva, Government Glad-Hand Girl No. 1 of the extravagant political novelette that is Argentina."

"It was long ago in my life as a simple reporter that I decided that facts must never get in the way of truth."

"If one might wish for impossibilities, I might then wish that my children might be well versed in physical science, but in due subordination to the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. ... [R]ather than have it the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament. Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy."

"My highest ambition, and what I hope to do as far as I can, is to make my history the very reverse of Gibbon in this respect,—that whereas the whole spirit of his work, from its low morality, is hostile to religion, without speaking directly against it, so my greatest desire would be, in my History, by its high morals and its general tone, to be of use to the cause, without actually bringing it forward."

"With regard to reforms at Rugby, give me credit, I must beg of you, for a most sincere desire to make it a place of Christian education. At the same time, my object will be, if possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make."

"[H]e was quite incapable of enjoying any book or poem if he disapproved of the author's principles or even if he thought that the author was half-hearted in his support of righteousness. Molière gave him no pleasure and he was troubled by Shakespeare's apparent inability to create good men."

"His testimonials were few in number, and most of them couched in general language, but all speaking strongly of his qualifications. Amongst them was a letter from Dr. Hawkins, now Provost of Oriel, in which it was predicted that, if Mr. Arnold were elected to the head-mastership of Rugby, he would change the face of education all through the public schools of England."

"In the mid-nineteenth century the [public] schools underwent extensive reforms, championed by Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, who expanded their curriculum to include mathematics, modern languages and history, and who placed organised sport and evangelical Christianity at the centre of their social ethos. Thereafter, the public schools provided a model for secondary education in England, and one that was loved and resented in equal measure."

"I [found], on going to the university, that...the tone of young men...was universally irreligious. A religious undergraduate was very rare, very much laughed at when he appeared; and I think I may confidently say, hardly to be found among public-school men... A most singular and striking change has come over our public schools—a change too great for any person to appreciate adequately, who has not known them in both these times. This change is undoubtedly part of a general improvement of our generation in respect of piety and reverence, but I am sure that to Dr. Arnold's personal earnest simplicity of purpose, strength of character, power of influence, and piety...the carrying of this improvement into our schools is mainly attributable. He was the first. It soon began to be a matter of observation to us in the university that his pupils brought quite a different character with them to Oxford than that which we knew elsewhere. I do not speak of opinions; but his pupils were thoughtful, manly minded, conscious of duty and obligation."

"Arnold's own interpretation of the human past was no less immaculately ideal – a counterpart of the Middle Ages as seen in the vision of the Pre-Raphaelites. While he was writing a history of Rome, he could refer to the Romans as a people "whose distinguishing quality was their love of institutions and order, and their reverence for law". It was an unbalanced conclusion to draw from a history replete with violence and disorder. Arnold's treatment of historical personages is less a consideration of a man's ability than a judgement of moral character. Marius was "the lowest of democrats", Sulla "the most sincere of aristocrats". This is to foreshadow a common British trait in the twentieth century. It was indeed Arnold's purpose in writing his history of Rome to demolish Gibbon, and all the hated scepticism, cynicism and worldliness of the eighteenth century... Arnold was equally a prototype of a common later British attitude to world affairs. He strikes a very modern note over the Opium War with China in 1840 in a letter to a friend."

"Over the evolution of the public school Dr Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby from 1827 until his death in 1841, exercised a decisive influence. Arnold himself expressed in his own stormy personality all the moral obsessions and emotional fervour of early Victorian evangelicalism. Arnold's Rugby was the most important and influential of the schools that served as prototypes for the numerous new public schools that opened between 1840 and 1900 to cater for the swelling middle classes. Arnold more than any other individual gave late Victorian English education both its concern with moral conduct and its distinctive mark of romanticism. Religion for Arnold, as for the rest of his generation, meant "...what the Gospel teaches us to mean by it, it is nothing less than a system directing and influencing our conduct, principles and feelings..." It followed that the first purpose of education was to inculcate Christian morality. "It is not necessary", he wrote, "that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen." Christian morality was thus very much more important than, for example, scientific knowledge... Arnold went so far as to resign from the governing body of the new London University because religion was not to be a compulsory examination subject: "... An University that conceived of education as not involving in it principles of moral truths would be an evil.""

"The distinction between Christianity and all other systems of religion consists largely in this, that in these other, men are found seeking after God, while Christianity is God seeking after man."

"As of rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ring-leaders from the Tarpeian rock."

"Real knowledge, like every thing else of the highest value, is not to be obtained easily. It must be worked for, — studied for, — thought for, — and, more than all, it must be prayed for."

"I do not often venture to talk to you about public affairs, but surely you will agree with me in deprecating this war with China, which really seems to me so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude, and it distresses me very deeply. Cannot any thing be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men's minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring? I really do not remember, in any history, of a war undertaken with such combined injustice and baseness. Ordinary wars of conquest are to me far less wicked, than to go to war in order to maintain smuggling, and that smuggling consisting in the introduction of a demoralizing drug, which the government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority."

"The only solution for dealing with the IRA is to kill 600 people in one night."

"A few attempts have been made to argue that a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union might not have been wholly disadvantageous to the Western powers, and that therefore a second phase of appeasement after 1941 might have been preferable to continued war. Some British Tories, notably the late Alan Clark, have suggested that the British Empire might have been spared ignominious bankruptcy, decline and fall, had a separate peace been made along the lines Rudolf Hess seems to have envisaged and Hitler repeatedly mused about in his evening monologues; in a similar vein, some American conservatives argue that the Cold War might have been avoided had Roosevelt kept the United States out of the shooting war in Europe. On the whole, however, most writers have tended to take the view that a Nazi victory would have been a worse outcome than that of 1945. Even if a victorious Third Reich had opted for peace with Britain and America - which cannot be regarded as very probable - the price would have been horrendously high for the millions of people left under Nazi rule. All nine million of the Jews of Europe might have been murdered, rather than the nearly six million who actually were, to say nothing of the vast human suffering that would have been inflicted on other ethnic groups by the implementation of the Generalplan Ost, which envisaged deporting around fifty million East Europeans to Siberia."

"I am confirmed in my opinion that it is hopeless here. All we can do is arm the Orangemen – to the teeth – and get out."

"You cannot come here because you are not white."

"Pinkish toffs like Ian Gilmour] and Charlie Morrison], having suffered, for ten years, submission to their social inferior see in Michael [Heseltine] an arriviste, certainly, who can't shoot straight and in Jopling's damning phrase 'bought all his own furniture', but one who at any rate seeks the cachet. While all the nouves in the party think he (Michael) is the real thing."

"I want to fire the whole lot. Instantly. Out, out. No "District" commands, no golden bowlers, nothing. Out … If I could, I'd do what Stalin did to Tukhachevsky."

"I fell into conversation with Douglas. His is a split personality. À deux he is delightful; clever, funny, observant, drily cynical. But get him anywhere near "display mode", particularly if there are officials around, and he might as well have a corncob up his arse. Pompous, trite, high-sounding, cautiously guarded."

""The trouble with [[w:Michael Heseltine|[Michael] Heseltine]] is that he had to buy all his furniture." Snobby, but cutting."

"I only can properly enjoy carol services if I am having an illicit affair with someone in the congregation. Why is this? Perhaps because they are essentially pagan, not Christian, celebrations."

"So what does it matter where it was when it was hit? We could have sunk it if it'd been tied up on the quayside in a neutral port and everyone would still have been delighted."

"I am not a fascist. Fascists are shopkeepers, I am a Nazi."