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

See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.

Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

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.

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.

It is in the company of men pursuing a same ideal that the still weavering (or unsteady) soul can set oneself (“se fixer”, Fr) and stick to (or attach to) everything that is noble and generous.

Amnesty, that noble word, the genuine dictate of wisdom.

Our horizon is the creation of a noble society to which, like the medieval builder of those glorious cathedrals.

Every noble deed dieth, if suppressed in silence.

To be envied is a nobler fate than to be pitied.

Let this circumstance of our constitution therefore be directed to this noble purpose

Sometimes the type of person from the old machine, who is everything but an appealing figure, happens to win an election. But democracy applies to everyone, not just the noble and the clever.

The human intellect has not been able to conceive of anything more noble and sublime in the history of the world than the teachings of the Upanishads.