“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.

They can open the way to credit expansion by the banks. They can thus create an artificial boom and the appearance of prosperity. But such a boom is bound to collapse soon or late and to bring about a depression.

The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers.

[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics

Take them out onto the verandah and beat them with a cricket bat…. Be intellectually rigorous. Identify your biases, your prejudices, your privilege.

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

As a child I wanted to be a grown-up. I wanted to know everything – not that I like to talk about it. I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion.