“Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.”

As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.

Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous.

As an entrepreneur in India put it: ‘Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself.

The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.

Intellect is not wisdom.

Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.

Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.

The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.

The government is indeed an institution, but “the market” is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.

Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.

Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.

The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves.

Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.

Don’t you get tired of seeing so many “non-conformists” with the same non-conformist look?

You realize as a director that when you are cutting a film, you want to have alternatives. You need color and choices. You don’t want four takes that are identical.

To me, growing old is great. It’s the very best thing – considering the alternative.

I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.

There is no alternative to success. So stop thinking you should already be there.

The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.

When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.

Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.