“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.”

Intellect is not wisdom.

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.

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

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.

There are those who say that seeing is believing. I am telling you that believing is seeing.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

If you believe in subjective morality, why do you lock your doors at night?

Believe with all your heart that you will do what you were made to do.

Our persona was not created by accident; it was created in order to camouflage the parts of ourselves we deemed the most undesirable and to overcompensate for what we believe to be our deepest flaws. What persona are you hiding behind?

I believe that any man’s life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement, if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day, and as nearly as possible reaching the high-water mark of pure and useful living.

I thank my old self who chose to be brave, how he believed there would be so much in front of me, and by all that, he was ready to face growth.

I am caught between the meadow and the sky knowing I can walk long distances, but believing there’s something greater than where my feet can take me.