“The rising enrollment of women in the paid labor force is a straightforward consequence of the industrial revolution of two hundred years ago.”

It is remarkable how little agitation there is against those practices.

The nature of the duties to be performed, the method of payment, the form of supervision, the tenure system, the market in which the workers find jobs, and the physical hazzards are all very different from the way things are in other occupations.

[On affirmative action:] Universities give a boost in admissions for other factors besides race, factors that bring no social benefit, such as athletic ability, celebrity of parents, and alumni connections.

[Economists’ advice] is something like patent medicine – people know it is largely manufactured by quacks and that a good percentage of the time it won’t work, but they continue to buy the brand whose flavor they like.

Whether the flavour of economic advice you like is conservative or liberal, you will find that flavour available from some ‘reputable’ economist, since there is no single standard to which all ‘reputable’ economists must repair.

To be a housewife is to be a member of a very peculiar occupation, one with characteristics like no other.

The liberation of women from exclusive domesticity did not originate in feminist books, or a war, or a big inflation, although they contributed to its progress.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth)

The “discovery” of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the “discovery” of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.

I get over a hundred letters a day from all over the world, from children and parents, and it’s a wonder I ever have time to write books, let alone speak!

If the federal government is going to cost $100 million or more of your jobs going away, at a minimum the people who are elected by the people ought to have to vote and say, yes, I support taking away your job; or no, I don’t support taking away your job.

To realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.

Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.

If I advance; follow me. If I retreat; kill me. If I die; avenge me! It is better to live one day as a lion than one-hundred years as a sheep!