“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 .”

Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.

The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done.

This is what capitalism, the much abused profit system, has brought about and brings about daily anew. Yet, most present-day governments and political parties are eager to destroy this system.

The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation.

The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is that the income and wealth of the well-to-do classes can be freely tapped.

There is but one means available to improve the material conditions of mankind: to accelerate the growth of capital accumulated as against the growth in population.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction.

Economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings and actions.

Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.

Liberty is always freedom from the government.

The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right.

The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

Economic progress is the work of the savers, who accumulate capital, and of the entrepreneurs, who turn capital to new uses.

The market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote.

What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.

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.

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.

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.

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.