| Quotes |
Topic |
| Finance and Economics | The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity. |
| Finance and Economics | The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles. |
| Finance and Economics | American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected. |
| Finance and Economics | Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated. |
| Government | It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. |
| Government | While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others. |
| Government | Mystical references to "society" and its programs to "help" may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats. |
| Government | Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric. |
| Government | What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long. |
| Government | "What freedom does a starving man have?" The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition- perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things. |
| Government | Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights. |
| Government | If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is -- and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive. |
| Government | The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive. |
| Government | What is politically defined as economic "planning" is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by government officials. |
| Government | If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism. |
| Government | Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days. |
| Government | The celebration of unbounded individualism means, beyond some point, the acceptance of force- either private or public . |
| Government | Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force. |
| Government | Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. |
| Government | Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.". |
| - Page 1 - 2 - 3 - Next |