“The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.”

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.

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 law is a battery, which protects all that is behind it, but sweeps with destruction all that is outside.

If we could bottle your luck, we’d have a weapon of mass destruction on our hands.

Hundreds of millions of human beings on our planet increasingly suffer from unemployment, poverty, hunger, and the destruction of their families.

There was a much more self-destructive nature in ‘Appetite.’ It was a going-for-it-at-all-cost thing that worked then.

I am not self-destructive. I am not a person who wants to die.

I only write about stuff that’s happened to me.. stuff I can’t get past personally. Luckily, I’m quite self-destructive.

Faith in anything, be it positive or negative, produces results. Putting faith in fear generates destructive results, beginning with the disintegration of our ability to relate confidently to the external world.

You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.