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The most pernicious of all taxes are the arbitrary.

David Hume

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David Hume
Age: 65 †
Born: 1711
Born: April 26
Died: 1776
Died: August 25
Economist
Essayist
Historian
Librarian
Philosopher
Writer
Edinburgh
Scotland
David Home
Hume
Pernicious
Arbitrary
Taxes

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To invent without scruple a new principle to every new phenomenon, instead of adapting it to the old to overload our hypothesis with a variety of this kind, are certain proofs that none of these principles is the just one, and that we only desire, by a number of falsehoods, to cover our ignorance of the truth.
David Hume
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Such a superiority do the pursuits of literature possess above every other occupation, that even he who attains but a mediocrity in them, merits the pre-eminence above those that excel the most in the common and vulgar professions.
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If God is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good, whence evil? If God wills to prevent evil but cannot, then He is not omnipotent. If He can prevent evil but does not, then he is not good. In either case he is not God.
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Time is a perishable commodity.
David Hume
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It is with books as with women, where a certain plainness of manner and of dress is more engaging than that glare of paint and airs and apparel which may dazzle the eye, but reaches not the affections.
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Every disastrous accident alarms us, and sets us on enquiries concerning the principles whence it arose: Apprehensions spring up with regard to futurity: And the mind, sunk into diffidence, terror, and melancholy, has recourse to every method of appeasing those secret intelligent powers, on whom our fortune is supposed entirely to depend.
David Hume
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..when, in my philosophical disquisitions, I deny a providence and a future state, I undermine not the foundations of society, but advance principles, which they themselves, upon their own topics, if they argue consistently, must allow to be solid and satisfactory.
David Hume
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Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients action, pleasure and indolence. And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according to the disposition of the person, yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting without destroying in some measure the relish of the whole composition.
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I cannot but bless the memory of Julius Caesar, for the great esteem he expressed for fat men and his aversion to lean ones.
David Hume
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It seems to me, that the only Objects of the abstract Sciences or of Demonstration is Quantity and Number, and that all Attempts to extend this more perfect Species of Knowledge beyond these Bounds are mere Sophistry and Illusion.
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There is, indeed a more mitigated scepticism or academical philosophy, which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undistinguished doubts are corrected by common sense and reflection.
David Hume
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The whole of natural theologyresolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous proposition, That the cause or causesof order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.
David Hume
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It is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work
David Hume
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Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.
David Hume
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Disbelief in futurity loosens in a great measure the ties of morality, and may be for that reason pernicious to the peace of civil society.
David Hume
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Everything is sold to skill and labor and where nature furnishes the materials, they are still rude and unfinished, till industry, ever active and intelligent, refines them from their brute state, and fits them for human use and convenience.
David Hume
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What is easy and obvious is never valued and even what is in itself difficult, if we come to knowledge of it without difficulty, and without and stretch of thought or judgment, is but little regarded.
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The identity that we ascribe to things is only a fictitious one, established by the mind, not a peculiar nature belonging to what we’re talking about.
David Hume
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To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential to being a sound, believing Christian.
David Hume
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While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.
David Hume