“Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.”

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.

Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.

The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves.

Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.

Don’t you get tired of seeing so many “non-conformists” with the same non-conformist look?

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don’t want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.

Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.

We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.

My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.

I think the American people should express their preferences, and we’ll accept their choice.

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

Why accept failure when success is free?

Yes I make mistakes that I don’t ever make excuses for.

I put my flaws on front street. So the world accepted my flaws, so I don’t have any flaws.

Some lose all mind and become soul, insane. some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual – some lose both and become accepted.

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.