How the Scots Invented the Modern World Quotes

“The point of this book is that being Scottish is more than just a matter of nationality or place of origin or clan or even culture. It is also a state of mind, a way of viewing the world and our place in it.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“a mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that “natural liberty” which they have enjoyed in the first place.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“When the ruler or rulers failed to act in the people’s interest, Buchanan wrote, then each and every citizen, even “the lowest and meanest of men,” had the sacred right and duty to resist that tyrant, even to the point of killing him.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“human ingenuity will find a way to defy government rules and regulations, such as customs tariffs, when they fly in the face of self-interest.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“Knowledge is power—all Scottish philosophers recognized this— and the route to knowledge is through experience. But Reid insisted that that power belonged to every man, regardless of any other attributes. Human progress rests on expanding that capacity to its utmost and to as many people as possible, so that we can all become truly, morally free.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“The term used to describe them was rednecks, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was cracker, from the Scots word craik for “talk,” meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“The archetypal dwelling of the American frontier, the log cabin, was in fact a Scots development, if not invention. The word itself, cabine, meant any sort of rude enclosure or hut, made of stone and dirt in Scotland, or sod and mud in Ireland.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“Today Americans call their descendants “Scotch-Irish,” but we must consider them Scots in every significant respect. In truth, they are the first representatives of the great Scottish diaspora that changed the rest of the world.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“Carnegie extolled the virtues of the American system, telling Britons, “The great error in your country is that things are just upside down. You look to your officials to govern you instead of you governing them.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“self-conscious principle: change as reform, rather than revolution.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“As a society becomes economically more active and affluent, Millar explained, “the lower people, in general, become thereby more independent in their circumstances.” They “begin to exert those sentiments of liberty which are natural to the mind of man.” But here Millar warned of a looming collision, as the people rise up to demand their liberty and the rulers try desperately to hang on to their old position and power. The result must inevitably be revolution. It had happened in Britain once before, Millar argued, during the English Civil War. It had happened again in France, in 1789.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“to be known as “an Edinburgh Reviewer” made people stop and stare at dinner parties or literary gatherings—although sometimes it made other people stand up and walk out.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“The editors also realized an important secret in publishing, that information is made more memorable when it is tinged with bias. The Edinburgh Review’s motto was, “The judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted.” The magazine became famous for its likes and dislikes, although “hatreds” might be a better word”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“As in old Edinburgh, drink opened the doors for free intellectual exchange. The”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“At Jeffrey’s table, “the talk [was] always good, but never ambitious, and those listening never in disrepute.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“For example, Stewart downplayed the “common” aspect of the commonsense philosophy, and implied it should really be read as “good sense”—in other words, that our commonsense judgments reflect “that prudence and discretion which are the foundation of successful conduct.” While the foundations of truth were still equally available to all human beings, it was also clear that, in that respect, some are more equal than others. A trained political economist such as Adam Smith, Stewart would argue, will have more insight into the laws of human behavior, and be better able to predict how a certain fiscal policy will compel people to act, than the people themselves. Likewise, an experimental scientist such as Joseph Black will be able to offer a more comprehensive and more precise account of our daily reality than our own untrained and unscientific understanding.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“Common sense tells us that we can understand and navigate our way through that reality, and common sense tells us that the more we know about that outside world, the better we can act on it, both as individuals and as members of a community.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“The man who claimed to be better than anyone else had to be ready to prove it, with his words, his actions, or his fists.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“Through capitalism we gain, but we also lose. The loss, Smith felt, was felt most among the lowest classes—his particular example was employees in a pin factory—whose cramped place in the chain of production leaves no room for the enlargement of the mind and spirit, which the freedom of commercial society should open up. Smith in fact defined the problem of the “assembly line” mentality of factory workers almost two decades before the Industrial Revolution got fully under way—the problem that Karl Marx and his followers would call alienation. It was especially worrisome to Smith, because “in free countries, where the safety of government depends very much upon the favourable judgement which the people may form of its conduct,” a mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that “natural liberty” which they have enjoyed in the first place.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“It put the interest of the producers and merchants ahead of that of consumers, who only want low prices and a ready supply of goods. Merchants often prefer the opposite.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“Rather, it was more beneficial, and ultimately more rational, than ones put together by politicians or rulers, who are themselves creatures of their own passions and whims.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“We recall that for Hutcheson, human happiness had been about personal liberty, the capacity to live one’s life as one saw fit without harming others. For Kames, it had been about owning property, which gave us our sense of “propriety” and identity as human beings. Now Smith put the two together. By entering and competing in the great interactive dynamic network of modern society, at once impersonal but also indispensable to happiness, we become fully free and human. Independence in this sense becomes the hallmark of modern society, just as dependence on others or “servility” becomes the hallmark of primitive societies and institutions. “Nobody but a beggar,” Smith admonished, “chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.” Yet this has been the essential fate of the vast majority of humankind through most of history, as slaves toiling for their masters, as peasants handing over the harvest to their feudal lords, or as members of the tribe or clan dependent on their chieftains’ command for life or death—hapless creatures whose quality of life rests entirely on whether their chief is “gentle Lochiel” or a brute like Coll MacDonnell. Capitalism breaks that cycle, and offers the conditions under which we forge our own happiness: independence, material affluence, and cooperation with others. Today, more than two hundred years later, three great myths still surround Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“the pursuit of our own self-interest actually causes us to reach out to others.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“Luxury employ’d a million of the poor,
and odious pride a million more;
Envy itself and vanity
were ministers of industry;
Their darling folly, fickleness
In diet, furniture, and dress,
That strange ridic’lous vice, was made
The very wheel that turn’d the trade.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“but from their regard to their own interest.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“It sprang from their pursuit of intellectual detachment in observing human affairs, in noticing how our intentions and expectations so often differ from our actual performance. In Smith’s case, that detachment allowed him to see that the charity cases of commercial society’s “universal opulence” included not only the indigent and homeless at the bottom of the social scale, but the rich and famous at the top. It also led him to perceive the real significance of self-interest as a human motivation.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“As we continue to specialize and become increasingly more productive, the fruits of our labor are no longer things we consume ourselves. They become “commodities,” literally the things that make our lives comfortable, which we buy and sell in exchange for other goods.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“The rich consume little more than the poor [after all, you can drive only one Rolls-Royce at a time] and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency [and] their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand [my emphasis] to make the same distribution of the necessarities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants. . . . Thus, without intending it, without knowing it, [the rich] advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“The rich man is the man with the most fertile imagination, in other words; his eyes really are bigger than his stomach.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It