The essential function of the State is to maintain peace, justice, law, and order, and to protect the individual citizen against aggression, violence, theft, and fraud.

Give me the clear blue sky above my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner - and then to thinking!

Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment.

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man

When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.

The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.

The envious are more likely to be mollified by seeing others deprived of some advantage than by gaining it for themselves. It is not what they lack that chiefly troubles them, but what others have.

The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn't first take from someone else.

The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.

Inflation makes the extension of socialism possible by providing the financial chaos in which it flourishes. The fact is that socialism and inflation are cause and effect, they feed on each other!

There is no more certain way to deter employment than to harass and penalize employers.

Thinking is like loving and dying - each of us must do it for himself.

Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.

Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.

You cannot amputate your history from your destiny, because that is redemption.

I recognize that I possess a very special intellect, but at the same time, I recognize that I'm lacking in a lot of areas. But being well-rounded is greatly overrated.

The Champagne they have stored is getting more valuable every year.

I love being able to escape my past, even though my past was great.

I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.

the best people have the rottenest luck

Sometimes, you still have days when you don't just feel right, like there is a kind of congestion, and the flow isn't there. You're just not playing clearly.