The Wealth and Poverty of Nations Quotes

“Where there are kings, there must be the greatest cowards. For men’s souls are enslaved and refuse to run risks readily and recklessly to increase the power of somebody else. But independent people, taking risks on their own behalf and not on behalf of others, are willing and eager to go into danger, for they themselves enjoy the prize of victory.”
― David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

“As for me, I prefer truth to goodthink. I feel surer on my ground.”
― David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

“But in 1497, pressure from the Roman Church and Spain led the Portuguese crown to abandon this tolerance. Some seventy thousand Jews were forced into a bogus but nevertheless sacramentally valid baptism. In 1506, Lisbon saw its first pogrom, which left two thousand “converted” Jews dead. (Spain had been doing as much for two hundred years.) From then on, the intellectual and scientific life of Portugal descended into an abyss of bigotry, fanaticism, and purity of blood.* The descent was gradual. The Portuguese Inquisition was installed only in the 1540s and burned its first heretic in 1543; but it did not become grimly unrelenting until the 1580s, after the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in the person of Philip II. In the meantime, the crypto-Jews, including Abraham Zacut and other astronomers, found life in Portugal dangerous enough to leave in droves. They took with them money, commercial know-how, connections, knowledge, and—even more serious—those immeasurable qualities of curiosity and dissent that are the leaven of thought. That was a loss, but in matters of intolerance, the persecutor’s greatest loss is self-inflicted. It is this process of self-diminution that gives persecution its durability, that makes it, not the event of the moment, or of the reign, but of lifetimes and centuries. By 1513, Portugal wanted for astronomers; by the 1520s, scientific leadership had gone. The country tried to create a new Christian astronomical and mathematical tradition but failed, not least because good astronomers found themselves suspected of Judaism.12 (Compare the suspicious response to doctors in Inquisition Spain.)”
― David S. Landes, Wealth And Poverty Of Nations

“The stress on observation and the reality principle—you can believe what you see, so long as you see what I see—paid off beyond understanding.”
― David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

“Na Turquia otomana, o serviço de combate a incêndios estava entregue a companhias privadas que acudiam a correr quando soava o alarme. Competiam entre si e negociavam o preço com os donos da casa no próprio local. Enquanto as negociações prosseguiam, o incêndio atingia novas proporções e o que estava em jogo consumia-se. Ou propagava-se. Entre mesquinhez e ganância, muito incêndio em residência se converteu numa conflagração em massa.”
― David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor