Best Life Quotes

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned. — Milton Friedman

We cannot expect existing businesses to promote legislation that would harm them. It is up to the rest of us to promote the public interest by fostering competition across the board and to recognize that being pro-free enterprise may sometimes require that we be anti-existing business. — Milton Friedman

The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy. — Milton Friedman, Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of The Road to Serfdom

The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another. — Milton Friedman

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay — Milton Friedman

I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal. — Milton Friedman

What would you think of someone who said, “I would like to have a cat provided it barked”? Yet your statement that you favor a government provided it behaves as you believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The biological laws that specify the characteristics of cats are no more rigid than the political laws that specify the behavior of government agencies once they are established. The way the government behaves and the adverse consequences are not an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a consequence of its constitution in precisely the same way that a meow is related to the constitution of a cat. — Milton Friedman, Free to Choose

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand. — Milton Friedman

Force, violence, pressure or compulsion with a view to conformity, are both uncivilized and undemocratic. — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest. — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth. — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good. — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

A “no” uttered from the deepest conviction is better and greater than a “yes” merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble. — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding out the true path for ourselves and fearlessly following it. — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. — Frederic Bastiat

In war, the stronger overcomes the weaker. In business, the stronger imparts strength to the weaker. — Frederic Bastiat

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. — Frederic Bastiat

Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place — Frederic Bastiat, The Law

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. — Frederic Bastiat