“The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.”

The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done.

This is what capitalism, the much abused profit system, has brought about and brings about daily anew. Yet, most present-day governments and political parties are eager to destroy this system.

The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation.

The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is that the income and wealth of the well-to-do classes can be freely tapped.

There is but one means available to improve the material conditions of mankind: to accelerate the growth of capital accumulated as against the growth in population.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction.

Economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings and actions.

Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.

Liberty is always freedom from the government.

The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right.

The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

Economic progress is the work of the savers, who accumulate capital, and of the entrepreneurs, who turn capital to new uses.

The market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote.

What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.

The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.

You are not now to think what’s best to do, As in beginnings, but what must be done, Being thus enter’d; and slip no advantage That may secure you. Let them call it mischief; When it is past, and prosper’d , ’twill be virtue.

Mischiefs feed / Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.

A learned woman is thought to be a comet that bodes mischief whenever it appears.

Honor’s a fine imaginary notion, that draws in raw and unexperienced men to real mischiefs.

Americans have no idea of the extent of their government’s mischief… the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.

The sower of the seed is assuredly the author of the whole harvest of mischief.

There is no end to the undeserved misery and mischief it could create.

She who means no mischief does it all.