“The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.”

If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment.

The word ‘free’ is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with ‘freedom.’ The word ‘fair’ is not used in either of our founding documents.

Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

There’s no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn’t exist.

Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.

Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.

One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.

If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

The winds of time eventually turn them into the tools of industrial civillisation. It’s never unscathed.

A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality.

It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization during my lifetime.

I think that in the essence of human civilization, we have the desire to become rich without limit, by taking the lives of other creatures.

I think that in the essence of human civilization, we have the desire to become rich without limit, by taking the lives of other creatures.

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.

The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.