“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.”

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 speed with which we in the Congress are going down is sometimes frightening. Government administration in the districts is rapidly reaching a low level. No strong opposition party has been able to emerge.

A Constitution is not the act of a Government, but of a people constituting a government, and a government without a constitution is a power without right.

A constitution defines and limits the powers of the government it creates. It therefore follows, as a natural and also a logical result, that the governmental exercise of any power not authorized by the constitution is an assumed power, and therefore illegal.

It is important that we should never lose sight of this distinction. We must not confuse the peoples with their governments.

I thought I was benefiting the Indians as well as the government, by taking them all over the United States, and giving them a correct idea of the customs, life, etc., of the pale faces, so that when they returned to their people they could make known all they had seen.

Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.

As an Indian, I would like to back my government.

Let’s get the government stay out of our private lives, once and for all, and stop arresting smokers. Let’s take a stand for personal freedom.