“The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned.”

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.

The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.

The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.

The causes of all panics, crashes and depressions can be summed up in only four words: the misuse of credit.

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.

What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.

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.

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

Whatever has “wit enough to keep it sweet” defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.