“The State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.”

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”

People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?

Always remember this: If you don’t attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.

A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

Most of the problems that we have are brought on by the government and not by music. Music is a mirror of what we’re going through, not the cause of what we’re going through.

If we desire rules to govern our spiritual development we turn back to the Sermon on the Mount.

The best way for the Government to maintain its credit is to pay as it goes-not by resorting to loans, but by keeping out of debt-through an adequate income secured by a system of taxation, external or internal, or both.

A government is for the benefit of all the people.

When I find a man who is not willing to pay his share of the burden of the government which protects him, I find a man who is unworthy to enjoy the blessings of a government like ours.

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?

Betting against gold is the same as betting on governments. He who bets on governments and government money bets against 6,000 years of recorded human history.