I write this on Thurs., Feb. 19, 2026. Yesterday evening, I was reading a section of Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose on the Negative Income Tax, as part of my revising a paper I have submitted to The Independent Review. As I was reading, I was surprised and numbly elated to serendipitously run across information that I had been seeking, off and on, literally for decades. Every so often I had occasion to tell a story that I was sure originated with Frank Knight. I wrote the script on Frank Knight for an audio series on Great Economists. (The current owners of the series refuse to pay me the royalties that I am owed, but that is another story.) So I thought I knew something about Knight, and own many books and articles by him. Every once in a while I spent an hour or so looking for the quotation, always failing. I even emailed Ross Emmett who many view as the current leading expert on Knight. He said he knew nothing of the quote I sought.
Buddhists who are totally at peace do not carry around with them the annoyance of unanswered questions, so if they run across an answer, it means nothing to them. Maybe this helps understand what Pasteur meant when he lectured that “chance favors only the prepared mind” (1854). The prepared mind carries around unanswered questions, unresolved contradictions, flaws in the world that could use improving. Then that mind stays alert for answers to the questions, resolutions to the contradictions, fixes for the flaws. The mind that pulls us forward is not a mind at peace.
[As an addendum, my discovery of the quote in Milton and Rose Friedman’s most famous book, after many searches in much more obscure places, reminds me of what Gertrude Himmelfarb said in a lecture at the U. of Chicago when I was a graduate student many decades ago. She searched the dusty archives long and hard, but the material most useful for her book on Harriet Taylor’s influence on Mill’s On Liberty, was hiding in plain sight in a volume written by F.A. Hayek on Mill’s correspondence with Taylor.]
Here after decades of occasional search and constant alertness, is the testimony of Milton and Rose, two former students of Frank Knight, showing that my memory of the Frank Knight duck V-formation story was not a dream or hallucination:
Our great and revered teacher Frank H. Knight was fond of illustrating different forms of leadership with ducks that fly in a V with a leader in front. Every now and then, he would say, the ducks behind the leader would veer off in a different direction while the leader continued flying ahead. When the leader looked around and saw that no one was following, he would rush to get in front of the V again. That is one form of leadership—undoubtedly the most prevalent form in Washington.
Source of Milton and Rose quote is:
The Himmelfarb book mentioned in my initial comments is:
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill. New York: Knopf, 1974.
The Hayek book mentioned in my initial comments is:
Hayek, F.A. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951. [Some citations to the book have the word “Correspondence” substituted for “Friendship.”]