Invisible Quotes - Page 13

Adam Smith is an egalitarian, he believed in equality of outcome, not opportunity. He is an enlightenment figure, pre-capitalist. He says, suppose in England, one landowner got most of the land and other people would have nothing to live on. He says it wouldn't matter much, because the rich land owner, by virtue of his sympathy for other people would distribute resources among them, so that by an invisible hand, we would end up with a pretty egalitarian society. That is his conception of human nature.

Let's take Adam Smith, the patron-saint of capitalism, what did he think? He thought the main human instinct was sympathy. In fact, take a look at the word "invisible hand." Which, of course, you learned about, or you think you've learned about. Take a look at the actual way in which he used the phrase. There is almost no relation to what is claimed.

If an invisible man catches on fire, can you see him burn?

I suspect the older you get the more invisible you become.

I love CGI if it's invisible. I don't like it when it's there and obvious.

Intelligence is silence, truth is being invisible. But what a racket I make in declaring this.

I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

The invisible hand in politics operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market.

There is only one power and one dictatorship whose organisation is salutary and feasible: it is that collective, invisible dictatorship of those who are allied in the name of our principle.

If you go back to Adam Smith, you find the idea that markets and market forces operate as an invisible hand. This is the traditional laissez-faire market idea. But today, when economics is increasingly defined as the science of incentive, it becomes clear that the use of incentives involves quite active intervention, either by an economist or a policy maker, in using financial inducements to motivate behavior. In fact, so much though that we now almost take for granted that incentives are central to the subject of economics.

How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?

As a private person, professionally I am invisible.

Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.

When I interviewed the evangelical Christian youth group who were protesting the Village Voice, I wanted them to feel they could freely tell me things like, "Did you know that 90 percent of prostitutes don't want to be doing it?" Is that unfair? That's sort of an invisible privilege for me.

Ideas are the invisible Gods of our universe!

If you wish to get hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.

I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.

I'm a big believer in the negligee, that nearly invisible screen standing between you and the object of your desire.

I'd like to be invisible. To be anonymous and see things for what they really are. The truth may be painful but it's probably useful!

In the darkness, he is invisible, but I can still feel him beside me. Sometimes you don't have to see something to know it is there.

...she could only wait for someone, something, to free her from the invisible chains that bound her.

Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.