95 quotes
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.
Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
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.
Right after liberal Democrats, the most dangerous politicians are country club Republicans.
If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.
Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
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.
We will do almost anything for our visions, except think about them. The purpose of this book is to think about them.
A Conflict of Visions (1987)
Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays (1987)
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.
Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.
While decisions are constrained by the kinds of organizations and the kinds of knowledge involved, the Impetus for decisions comes from the internal preferences and external incentives facing those who actually make the decisions.
Knowledge and Decisions (1980)
Prices play a crucial role in determining how much of each resource gets used where and how the resulting products get transferred to millions of people. Yet this role is seldom understood by the public and it is often disregarded entirely by politicians.
Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, "What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?" The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.
What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people—like themselves—need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.
People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
Nothing makes us understand the many roles of electricity in our lives like a power failure. Similarly, nothing shows more vividly the role and importance of price fluctuations in a market economy than the absence of such price fluctuations when the market is controlled.
Time was when people used to brag about how old they were -- and I am old enough to remember it.
Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.
Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
Most problems do not get solved. They get superseded by other concerns.
Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.
Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
Capitalist enterprises buy components from others who have lower costs in producing those particular components, and sell their own output to whatever middlemen can most efficiently carry out its distribution.