"The great truth which apparently must forever remain unlearned, that if a regime of complete economic freedom be established, social and political freedom will follow automatically; and until it is established neither social nor political freedom can exist." (30)
"The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government they can use." (33)
"Bureaucracy is ineradicable as a cancer, when once it gets well-rooted." (34)
"Society cannot be moralized and improved unless and until the individual is moralized and improved." (37)
"The worst of this ever growing cancer of Statism is its moral effect...it is already so poverty-stricken in its moral resources that the present drain will quickly run them out." (38)
"As government consolidates and strengthens, the power of independent moral judgment in the citizenry weakens." (38)
"The question I wish to raise is whether it is possible for human beings to be happy under a regime of absolutism." (39)
"Society gets on best when people are most happy and contented, which they are when freest to do as they please and what they please; hence society's interest is in having as little government as possible, and in keeping it decentralized as possible. The State, on the other hand, is administered by job holders; hence its interest is in having as much government as possible. It is hard to imagine two sets of interests more directly opposed than these." (40)
"Instead of recognizing the State as 'the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious, and decent men,' the fun of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent." (43)
"The point is only that when Society deprives the State of power to make positive interventions on the individual--power to make positive coercions upon him at any point in his economic and social life--then at one the State goes out of existence, and what remains is government." (43)
"A great deal of what we read about the arts seems in some such fashion as this to get clear away from the notion that the final purpose of the arts is to give joy." (55)
"Americans have been too thoroughly conditioned to serf-mindedness to care two straws about freedom, whereas economic security exactly suits them, and they will cheerfully sacrifice all their other prospects in this world and all their hopes for the next, in their determination to get it." (62-3)
"The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed." (63)
"There are two classes of things one should not worry about; the things one can help, and the things one can't help. If you can help a thing, don't worry about it; help it. If you can't help it, don't worry about it, for you do no good, and only wear yourself down below par." (64)
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