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

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 final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies.

No country can be called free which is governed by an absolute power; and it matters not whether it be an absolute royal power or an absolute legislative power, as the consequences will be the same to the people.

Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.

Beware the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.

Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.

The world is not going to fall as long as there is confidence in governments and in banking institutions and the financial system.

The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

Events of human origin are uncertain, but all is regulated and governed by the incalculable power of God, inspiring us not through drunken fury nor by frantic movement, but through the influences of the stars.