Iron Law

Iron law may refer to:

  • Iron law of population, from Thomas Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
  • Iron law of wages, from Ferdinand Lassalle's Subsistence theory of wages (mid 19th century)
  • Iron law of oligarchy, from Michels' Political Parties
  • Iron law of prohibition, from Cohen's How the Narcs Created Crack
  • Iron Law of Bureaucracy, from Jerry Pournelle.

Famous quotes containing the words iron and/or law:

    “Write while the heat is in you.... The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)