“State interference in economic life, which calls itself economic policy, has done nothing but destroy economic life. Prohibitions and regulations have by their general obstructive tendency fostered the growth of the spirit of wastefulness.”

Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.

What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.

The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.

Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a selfappointed elite of supermen.

A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.

The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.

Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.

Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will.

There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility.

If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses.

The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody…It is not in the power of the government to make everybody more prosperous.

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.

Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.

Eventually the banking systems of all advanced economies reach magnitudes of 500 percent,

A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.

The economic basis of this contest was the power to tax, to float bonds, to award franchise: in short, to gain control over the financial resources of the newly organized States.

We have never in human history seen a run-up in credit of the kind we have just witnessed in advanced economies since 1970.

The basic aggregate measure of gearing or leverage is telling us that today’s advanced economies’ operating systems are more heavily dependent on private sector credit than anything we have ever seen before.

Then our economic future will be very different from our recent past.