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

The excuse for the destruction of liberty is always the plea of necessary ‘ that there is no alternative.

There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.

A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.

Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?

You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.

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.

None of what Barack Obama is doing or wants to do to this country is anything the rest of the world hasn’t seen before and already failed at.

It is my belief that there is a greater understanding than ever that women need to be equal participants in our homes, in our societies, in our governments, and in our workplaces.

I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I’m in a cabinet meeting.

A republican government should be based on free and equal education among the people.

You can kill a revolutionary, but you cannot kill a revolution.

Governments are out of control, irresponsible, never have enough money, never tighten their own belts, and when they are forced to, they always threaten to shut down police departments and teachers and all these things.

Russian democracy is the power of the Russian people with their own traditions of national self-government, and not the realisation of standards foisted on us from outside.

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.