There cannot be a "good" society until there are "good" men.

The pertinent question: if Americans did not want these wars should they have been compelled to fight them?

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers.

Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery.

The early American knew that freedom was nothing more than the absence of external restraint on behavior; the government could not give you freedom, it could only take it away.

There cannot be a good tax nor a just one; every tax rests its case on compulsion.

If for no other reason, personal pride should prompt every governor and state legislator to take a secessionist attitude; they were not elected to be lackeys of the federal bureaucracy.

The State acquires power... and because of its insatiable lust for power it is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates.

Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids.

[When people] say 'let's do something about it,' they mean 'let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.' And that somebody is invariably you.

The wise communicate in subtle ways.

Christianity increases the scope and area of our lives.

Sometimes life is like living in a chamber of Liquid Oxygen. Liquid don't allow you to live and Oxygen don't let you die.

The common-sense notion that 'There is a time and place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

This idea that America is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn't really jibe with the experience of most people.

There's something so remarkable in the intensity of taking care of somebody who can't take care of him or herself. And then watching that little person bloom into adolescence.

The money footballers earn today is incredulous

I think the credit crunch is a brilliant thing. We should all stop moaning and start celebrating. When times are tough, it's an opportunity to start looking at life in a different way.

I'm pregnant with triplets now and I feel really good.

He is altogether selfish, she thought in some surprise, the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting.