There is no art which government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience?

A nation is not made wealthy by the childish accumulation of shiny metals, but it enriched by the economic prosperity of it's people.

Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.

On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

The measure of a society is its compassion.

No matter what challenges you are faced with, or the opinions people have of you, rejection in and of itself from others is not a valid system to predict your future.

Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.

If God, like a father, denies us what we want now it is in order to give us some far better thing later on. The will of God, we can rest assured, is invariably a better thing.

I've had to find my sanity.

Love comes to everybody in many different ways. Attraction is always the first thing, no? But love must be more than that. It must be magic.

[On General William Boykin] I hope he's not long for this world.

He started pushing to make birdies and you don't do that when you're down.