Quote

If you're Noah, and your ark is about to sink, look for the elephants first, because you can throw over a bunch of cats, dogs, squirrels, and everything else that is just a small animal and your ark will keep sinking. But if you can find one elephant to get overboard, you're in much better shape.

Vilfredo Pareto

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Vilfredo Pareto
Age: 75 †
Born: 1848
Born: July 15
Died: 1923
Died: August 20
Economist
Engineer
Mathematician
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Paris
France
Firsts
Dog
Sink
Everything
Animal
Cats
Ark
Looks
Small
Dogs
Noah
First
Keep
Cat
Overboard
Much
Else
Shape
Squirrels
Better
Throw
Elephant
Find
Bunch
Sinking
Look
Shapes
Elephants

More quotes by Vilfredo Pareto

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Usually, so far as improvement in the people's economic conditions is concerned, humanitarians simply play the role of the busybody.
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The party that called itself liberal aimed at respecting the liberty to dispose of one's own goods
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There are some people who imagine that they can disarm their enemy by complacent flattery. They are wrong. The world has always belonged to the stronger and will belong to them for many years to come. Men only respect those who make themselves respected. Whoever becomes a lamb will find a wolf to eat him.
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For a very long time, and among a large number of peoples, political power has belonged to the owners of the land.
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My wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry.
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Among civilized peoples, especially the very wealthy population of the United States of America, women have become objects of luxury who consume but do not produce.
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Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.
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Society is not homogeneous, and those who do not deliberately close their eyes have to recognize that men differ greatly from one another from the physical, moral, and intellectual viewpoints.
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In any series of elements to be controlled, a selected small fraction, in terms of numbers of elements, always accounts for a large fraction in terms of effect.
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Empirical laws [...] have only slight or even no value beyond the limits within which they have been observed to be true.
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It is a know fact that almost all revolutions have been the work, not of the common people, but of the aristocracy, and especially of the decayed part of the aristocracy.
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The liberals who demanded equality of taxation on behalf of the poor, for instance, did not imagine that they would obtain progressive taxation to the disadvantage of the well-off, and that they would end up with an arrangement in which taxes are voted by those who do not pay them.
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When it is useful to them, men can believe a theory of which they know nothing more than its name.
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Theories of natural law and the law of nations are another excellent example of discussions destitute of all exactness. [...] Natural law is simply that law of which the person using the phrase approves[....]
Vilfredo Pareto
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The intent of sincere humanitarians is to do good to society, just as the intent of the child who kills a bird by to much fondling is to do good to the bird.
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The economic and social theories used by those who take part in the social struggle ought to be judged not by their objective value but primarily for their effectiveness in arousing emotions. The scientific refutation of them which can be made is useless, however correct it may be objectively.
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Above, far above the prejudices and passions of men soar the laws of nature. Eternal and immutable, they are the expression of the creative power they represent what is, what must be, what otherwise could not be. Man can come to understand the: he is incapable of changing them.
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All governments use force and all assert that they are founded on reason. In fact, whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs, finding ways to give to'the will of the people'the expression which the few desire.
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The assertion that men are objectively equal is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted.
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Increase in the wealth per capita fosters democracy but the latter, at least according to what we have been able to observe up to now, entails great destruction of wealth and even eventually dries up the sources of it. Hence it is its own grave-digger, it destroys what gave it birth.
Vilfredo Pareto