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Look around, and you see everywhere the exertions and acts of individuals restricted, regulated, or promoted, on the principle of the common welfare.
Friedrich List
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Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote emphasizes how individual actions are influenced by the broader social good.

Friedrich List highlights the relationship between individual efforts and the collective welfare of society. He suggests that the behaviors and choices of individuals are not made in a vacuum; rather, they are shaped by societal principles that promote the common good. This reflects the interconnectedness of personal ambitions and societal responsibilities, urging us to recognize that our actions affect not only ourselves but also the community at large.

Themes

Common WelfareIndividual ActionsSocietyCollective GoodCommunity

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about social responsibility, one might say, 'As Friedrich List pointed out, our actions are shaped by the principle of common welfare.'

More from Friedrich List

It is bad policy to regulate everything... where things may better regulate themselves and can be better promoted by private exertions; but it is no less bad policy to let those things alone which can only be promoted by interfering social power.
Friedrich ListRead
An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.
Friedrich ListRead
Industry entirely left to itself, would soon fall to ruin, and a nation letting everything alone would commit suicide.
Friedrich ListRead

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Quote by Friedrich List | QuoteProject