“Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.”

Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.

Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.

The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.

The government is indeed an institution, but “the market” is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.

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.

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.

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.