Quotes to inspire and reflect

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.

When I was young, I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is.

Every man lives by exchanging.

When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

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.

It [economics] is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

It is because it’s prohibited. See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.

I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie that one party can only gain at the expense of another.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.

Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.

The absolute fundamental aim is to make money out of satisfying customers.

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.

Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

A man of business may talk of philosophy; a man who has none may practise it.

Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.

Advertising is legalized lying.

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

It is difficult, but not impossible, to conduct strictly honest business.

In business the man who engages in the most adventures is surest to come out unhurt.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. –

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

As government expands, liberty contracts.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.