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

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.

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.

Government cannot close its eyes to the pollution of waters, to the erosion of soil, to the slashing of forests any more than it can close its eyes to the need for slum clearance and schools.

In our democracy officers of the government are the servants, and never the masters of the people.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend on it.

We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face.

The United States is a place where the men govern, but the women rule.

We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.

In the eyes of government we are just one race here. It is American.