ABC’s of Freedom by Leonard E. Read

PREFACE

«I am more and more impressed,» notes Henry Hazlitt in Thinking as a Science, «with how little the individual could accomplish in any direction whatever if he had to depend entirely on his own unaided efforts… He could not think at all (or only at the level of a chimpanzee) if he did not inherit from the society and civilization in which he was born the priceless gift of an already-created languaje. Without this he would not only be unable to reason logically, he would have nothing worthy to be called a «concept». He could not frame a sentence; he could not even name things. We think in words, even in conversarions. Our language, concepts, and logic are part of the social inheritance of all of us.»