No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.

Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.

To understand is to perceive patterns.

The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.

Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

When the conflict deepens, none will have peace either.

Traditional marriage is what should be sanctioned.

I could always make people laugh.

President Bush in his inaugural address talked about bringing freedom to countries that don't have it. He didn't specify how.

You know the world must be flat, because when people leave town they never come back.

When you consciously choose to be ordinary, you become extraordinary.

I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

When all of your friends are getting pregnant, you start thinking about it. But for Amy and I, show business is our baby.