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

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.

What makes it [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do.

The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.

Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters’ own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.

There is one and only one responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.

Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

The essential notion of a capitalist society … is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.

You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

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

When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.

The Constitution is a radical document, it is the job of the government to rein in people’s rights.

Politics is not religion and we should govern on the basis of evidence, not theology.

You can’t say you love your country and hate your government.

That the policies – from energy to labor policies, trade policies, government policies relating to debt and deficits are all aligning in such a way that America, far from being one of the places people are running from, is a place people are going to come to and add jobs.

Sarah, there’s a government inside the government, and I don’t control it.

Together we will build an America where hope is a new job with a paycheck, not a faded word on an old bumper sticker.

The only true solution would be a convention under which all the governments would bind themselves to defend collectively any country that was attacked.

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.