“There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.”

You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

They seem to sense… that gold and economic freedom are inseparable.

Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world.

It’s not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating.

We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit.

The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged… and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.

We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past.

Recent episodes in which Fed officials hinted at a shift toward higher interest rates have unleashed significant volatility in markets.

No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.

Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.

This is the reason that history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.

The increased flexibility of our economy, which has fostered our extraordinary resilience to shocks.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It’s only a question of degree.

Cash is available and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.

No matter how many times your amazing, absolutely brilliant work is rejected by the client, for whatever dopey, arbitrary reason, there is often another amazing, absolutely brilliant solution possible. Sometimes it’s even better.

No language is as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.

Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works – winning best actor is arbitrary.

I wanted to make a movie about the arbitrary nature of love.

I started thinking about gender and how it’s an arbitrary thing if you’re born with an XX or XY chromosome, but it can determine your experience of the world. It’s about whether you are physically intimidating vs. being physically intimidated. It determines whether you are the one to take an active role in sex and society.

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.