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

The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.

The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can’t do that.

There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.

The government doesn’t have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union – like public housing in the United States – look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.

The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.

In the 1960s, The National Education Association changed its character. The NEA changed into a union. And from that point on you can see deterioration in the quality of schooling in the United States.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn’t do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn’t do a thing for them.

The power to do good is also the power to do harm.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Ronald Reagan was by far the greatest. Because he had real principles and he stuck by them. He made clear what he was going to do, and he did it. He didn’t back down.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.

A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.

Society is well governed when its people obey the magistrates, and the magistrates obey the law.

It is a base thing for a man among the people not to obey those in command. Never in a state can the laws be well administered when fear does not stand firm.

There’s a natural law of karma that vindictive people, who go out of their way to hurt others, will end up broke and alone.

Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time.

The whole thing of life and all the answers to everything are in one divine law, Karma action and reaction.

There is no such thing as “natural law”: this expression is nothing but old nonsense… Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold, in short, need.

In the ideal State laws are few and simple, because they have been derived from certainties. In the corrupt State laws are many and confused, because they have been derived from uncertainties.

Laws are like spider’s webs: If some poor weak creature comes up against them, it is caught; but a big one can break through and get away.