“What makes it [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do.”

A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.

Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?

You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.

The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.

The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can’t do that.

There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.

The government doesn’t have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union – like public housing in the United States – look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.

The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.

In the 1960s, The National Education Association changed its character. The NEA changed into a union. And from that point on you can see deterioration in the quality of schooling in the United States.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn’t do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn’t do a thing for them.

The power to do good is also the power to do harm.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Ronald Reagan was by far the greatest. Because he had real principles and he stuck by them. He made clear what he was going to do, and he did it. He didn’t back down.

There are fundamentals of democracy, and they should be understood universally in different countries.

A man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions.

One thing that concerns me is that today’s young women don’t seem to care that we have a fundamental instrument of government that makes no express statement about the equal citizenship stature of men and women.

Information is a basic human right and the fundamental foundation for the formation of democratic institutions.

Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy and the fundamental right upon which all our civil liberties rest.

No responsibility of government is more fundamental than the responsibility of maintaining the highest standard of ethical behavior for those who conduct the public business.

Knowledge is fundamental to all human achievements and progress.

Physics is a good framework for thinking. Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.