“Every socialist is a disguised dictator.”

In such vital matters blind reliance upon ‘experts’ and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and to yielding to other people’s domination.

Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen.

Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.

The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.

The struggle for freedom is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities, sometimes of a minority of but one man gainst the majority.

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement.

Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.

Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy.

Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.

All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out

The real bosses in the capitalist system of market economy are the consumers. They by their buying and by their abstention from buying decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.

State interference in economic life, which calls itself economic policy, has done nothing but destroy economic life. Prohibitions and regulations have by their general obstructive tendency fostered the growth of the spirit of wastefulness.

True, governments can reduce the rate of interest in the short run. They can issue additional paper money.

Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.

It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom.

Yes, a dictator can be loved. Provided that the masses fear him at the same time. The crowd love strong men. The crowd is like a woman.

A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.

I don’t like [to] make a woman … an abstract concept of the fashion. I don’t like [to] say, “You must wear that.” … I am not a dictator.

The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work’ with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West.