“When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.”

Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

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.

You realize as a director that when you are cutting a film, you want to have alternatives. You need color and choices. You don’t want four takes that are identical.

To me, growing old is great. It’s the very best thing – considering the alternative.

I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.

There is no alternative to success. So stop thinking you should already be there.

The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.

Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.

Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.