“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.”

The only people I truly envy are those who can play a musical instrument and those who can eat anything they want without gaining weight.

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.

No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.

The really painful surprise is that so many people based their hopes on his words, rather than on the record of his deeds.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.

No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government.

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

A society in which such decisions can only be made by males has thrown away half of its knowledge, talents, and insights.

If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.

Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: “You don’t seem smart enough to be so good at what you’re doing. Do you have an explanation?”

Can you worship a God who isn’t obligated to explain His actions to you? Could it be your arrogance that makes you think God owes you an explanation?

I live my life as I deem appropriate and fitting; I offer no apologies, no explanations.

One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.

Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.

Not all things needs an explanation. Sometimes, all it needs is emotion.

My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.