Robert Higgs Quotes

If my house is on fire, I don't need the fire chief telling me I should not have built the house out of wood. I need somebody to put the fire out.

There are times when fixing things quickly is the only option: when you have to channel MacGyver, reach for the duct tape, and cobble together whatever solution works right now. If someone is choking on a morsel of food, you don't sit back, stroke your chin and take the Aristotelian long view. You quickly administer the Heimlich maneuvre.

I think we live in a constant state of emergency.

Stamping out fires is a lot of fun, but it is only putting things back the way they were.

When my house burnes, it's not good playing at Chesse.

Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out.

In a fire, you have to be thoughtful; you have to have a certain kind of intuitive smarts that the veterans have. I'm not there yet, despite the Stanford degree.

You want to put the fire out first and then worry about the fire code.

Emergency does not read the law.

You take care of emergencies first—in life and in politics.

When your house is on fire—that is not the time to talk

Liberalism has never done as well as it thinks at resolving its own crises.

Patience, they say, is a virtue. Yet in times of emergency, the government needs to be able to make snap decisions and take bold, decisive action to protect the American people.

Over the years, I've been involved in many business crises. I qualify this, since my crises have never involved life and death or the survival of the human race. But they are still crises.

If the crisis lasts moments, rapid action is critical. But if it's simply the beginning of a broader issue, especially one where the root cause isn't known yet, the worst thing a leader can do is act immediately.

The fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organized, is whether there should be any state at all. Why not have anarchy?

When your house is burning down, you don't worry about the remodeling.

[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

When a house is on fire and you know that there are people in it, it is a sin to straighten pictures in that house. When the world about you is in great danger, works that are in themselves not sinful can be quite wrong.

Here's my philosophy in life: If there's a fire, you put it out. If there's a flood, you fill sandbags and you build a dike. You roll up your sleeves and you get to work.

You can't build politics on love. People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos.

When your house is on fire, you cant be bothered with the neighbors. Or, as we say in Chess, if your King is under attack you don't worry about losing a Pawn on the Queen's side

Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.

Not facing a fire doesn't put it out.

Signs of a poorly understood but treatable house fire requires action, not inaction.