3 Quotes & Sayings By Leonard Edward Read

Leonard E. Read was born in Glastonbury, Connecticut on December 19, 1913. He graduated from Yale University in 1934, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. During his military service in World War II he served as a commander of tank destroyers in Europe Read more

Following the war, Mr. Read worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in Germany where he met his wife, Ursula Engelhardt, whom he married in 1949. Mr.

Read received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1950 and joined the faculty of George Washington University's School of Business Administration in 1950 where he taught until his retirement in 1979. He received the Order of the Rising Sun from Japan's Emperor Hirohito in 1965 for his service to international relations between nations during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

His other major writings are The Way to Wealth through Reading (1937), The True Believer (1951), The Natural Law (1977), and Our Own Masterpiece (1985). Mr. Read died on January 14, 1986 at the age of seventy-six.

1
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth. . Leonard Edward Read
2
MY THESIS, in simplest terms, is: Let anyone do anything he pleases, so long as it is peaceful; the role of government, then, is to keep the peace... Keeping the peace means no more than prohibiting persons from unpeaceful actions... When government goes beyond this, that is, when government prohibits peaceful actions, such prohibitions themselves are, prima facie, unpeaceful. Leonard Edward Read