In a free society, individuals have the right to do right or wrong, as long as they don't threaten or infringe upon the rights or property of others.

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.

While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient.

If the price of everything is going down, that's going to include wages as well. People will have an incentive to sit on their cash and not spend it.

Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.

The #1 business opportunity for those who want to create new wealth is educating consumers about products and services that will improve their lives.

You can actually make a lot of money and do a lot of good in the world. I don't see those things as being in opposition to one another. I never have.

Gambling has held human beings in thrall for millennia. It has been engaged in everywhere, from the dregs of society to the most respectable circles.

To the extent that these [New Deal policies] developed, they were tortured interpretations of a document [the Constitution] intended to prevent them.

If you're not putting enough away for emergencies or retirement, making commitments in advance, such as signing up for payroll withholding, can help.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

Falsehood, like poison, will generally be rejected when administered alone; but when blended with wholesome ingredients may be swallowed unperceived.

Real cultural diversity results from the interchange of ideas, products, and influences, not from the insular development of a single national style.

You can’t prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why don’t the governments stop them?

The Laffer Curve illustrates the basic idea that changes in tax rates have two effects on tax revenues: the arithmetic effect and the economic effect.

There's a certain kind of academic that comes to Washington and can't survive. They're the ones starting each sentence with 'The economic model says.'

The 1992 crisis proved that the existing system was unstable. Not moving forward to the euro would have set up Europe for even more disruptive crises.

Textbooks describe economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. That definition may be the 'what,' but it certainly is not the 'why.'

History proves... that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.

Market discipline can only limit moral hazard to the extent that debt and equity holders believe that, in the event of distress, they will bear costs.

Growth in U.S. real imports slowed to about 3 percent in 2006, in part reflecting a drop in real terms in imports of crude oil and petroleum products.

It doesn't annoy me but I think of myself as a presenter who is gay, rather than a gay presenter. It's a subtle distinction, but that's how I view it.

The developed, oil-consuming countries can do several things to ease the transition to the new energy order. One would be to boost vehicle efficiency.

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.

The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.

The individual serves the planning system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it far more by consuming its products.

The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.

There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.

Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.

I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the means of securing an approximation to full employment.

In the face of sluggish growth, aging societies, and increasing educational attainment of young women, the economic case for gender equality is clear.

International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn't go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.

The diversity of Europe is its strength. But for a single currency to work, over a region with enormous economic and political diversity, is not easy.

Our present predicament comes from the fact that running the economy on blood is no longer fashionable. We can't end this depression with another war.

In Latin you say: "Repetita iuvant - to repeat is beneficial". The fewer changes made in a country, the more often I repeat my messages. And it works.

The budget targets imposed by the Bretton Woods institutions, combined with the effects of the devaluation, trigger the collapse of public investment.

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.

So you could have a very institutionally well-developed economy that's still very low in terms of its technological success. That would be unexpected.

People exaggerate their own skills. they are optimistic about their prospects and overconfident about their guesses, including which managers to pick.

One of society's thorniest problems is that children from poor families start school lagging badly behind their more affluent classmates in readiness.

Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising.

The best mental effort in the game of business is concentrated on the major problem of securing the consumer's dollar before the other fellow gets it.

Capitalism and market forces are very powerful in producing wealth and innovation. But we need to ensure that these forces act in the common interest.

Having a decent share of the national wealth for the middle class is not bad for growth. It is actually useful both for equity and efficiency reasons.

Everything I have today is because of Africa, I was born here, went to school here, I work here and I'm achieving some level of financial comfort here

Food is a product of supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed.

Presidents always want to do nice, noble, long-run things, and Congress is less keen to do so. We've seen that throughout the history of this country.

The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.

Remember, aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development base on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that.

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