Quotes
"The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector."
Henry Hazlitt
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
Thomas Sowell
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome becomes bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
Cicero (55 B.C)
"Where is the peace dividend that was supposed to come after the end of the Cold War? Where are the fruits of the amazing gains in efficiency that technology has afforded? It has been eaten by the bureaucracy that manages our every move on this earth. The voracious and insatiable monster here is called the Federal Code that calls on thousands of agencies to exercise the police power to prevent us from living free lives. It is as Bastiat said: the real cost of the state is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don't exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The state has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love."
William "Bill" Bonner
"The first job of good leadership is the leadership of self."
Dr Peter Ellyard
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
Cicero
"If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as 'social gains', if businessmen struggle for higher profitss, this is damned as 'selfish greed'."
Ayn Rand
"From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step."
F.A. Hayek
"Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property."
Frederic Bastiat
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
Henry David Thoreau
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
David Hume
"If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as 'social gains', if businessmen struggle for higher profitss, this is damned as 'selfish greed'."
Ayn Rand
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius
"If taxes could cool the earth, we would all be frozen to death by now."
Greg Kater
"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty!"
Thomas Jefferson
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
American Judge, Louis Brandeis
"There is just no doubt in my mind that the only true reason that Australian equities are currently commanding a 20% P/E discount to their 20 year average is because we have the highest level of Federal Government interference in business in 20 years. Markets simply don't believe that governments can allocate capital better than the private sector. They are correct."
Charlie Aitken, Southern Cross Equities
"Intaxication - Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realise it was your money to begin with."
Unknown
"The ten most terrifying words in the English language are "
Ronald Reagan
"The government is good at one thing...it knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government you wouldn't be able to walk'."
Harry Browne
"I take exception to people saying that Rudd, Gillard, Swan and Tanner are spending like drunken sailors. When I was a drunken sailor, I quit spending when I ran out of money."
Peter Jamieson
"There is nothing so easy to learn from experience, and nothing so hard to apply."
Josh Billings
"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
B.F. Skinner
"Government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution. The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off."
Ayn Rand
"The government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it."
Ronald Reagan
"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labour in freedom."
Albert Einstein
"Mystical references to "society" and its programs to "help" may warm the hearts of the gullible, but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats."
Thomas Sowell
"Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death."
Ayn Rand
"Think about last time you were broke ... now how well did it go with spending your way out of it? Did that work?"
PJ O'Rourke
"Combining debt and ignorance always produces interesting results."
Roger Montgomery, Chairman of Clime Captial Limited
"Think tanks are critical to the global ideas industry. They generate and fine-tune solutions to some of the most complex and vexing issues of the day. Leaders around the world need them to provide independent analysis, help set policy agendas, and bridge the gap between knowledge and power. Think tanks may be affiliated, independent institutions or structured as permanent bodies. They often act as a bridge between the academic and policymaking communities."
Thompson Ayodele, IPPA
"First you measure, then you tax! The function of government is to destroy the wealth created in the private sector..."
Ken Shock, Physicist, New Zealand
"What good fortune for those in power that people do not think."
Adolph Hitler
"Local government seems to attract the dregs of our political class. There are young factional hacks from political parties who view local government as well-paid work experience. There are activists who don't know much about government but know they hate ugly new houses spoiling their suburbs' "traditional character". And there are earnest greenies who campaign to declare their council "nuclear-free". Yes, councillors are a bizarre collection of the uninformed, the uninterested and the weirdly over-interested."
Chris Berg
"Really new trails are rarely blazed in the great academies. The confining walls of conformist dogma are too dominating. To think originally, you must go forth into the wilderness."
S. Warren Carey
"It is better to correct your own faults than those of another."
Democritus
"I"
Clint Eastwood (as quote in the Weekend Australian Magazine on March 24-25 2007)
"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
Victor Hugo
"Really new trails are rarely blazed in the great academies. The confining walls of conformist dogma are too dominating. To think originally, you must go forth into the wilderness."
S. Warren Carey
"What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world - that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison."
Richard S. Lindzen
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
Edward Abbey
"'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.'"
Thomas Jefferson 1802
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."
C.S. Lewis
"The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavour."
Vince Lombardi
"This is a period of wealth destruction. The people who make money will be few and far between. There will be a lot more money lost than made."
George Soros
Ludwig von Mises
"Ideas are more dangerous than guns"
Josef Stalin (1879-1953)
"No man is a success unless he has made a woman angry."
Anonymous
"Modern government has become a universal transfer agency that utilizes the political process for distributing vast measures of income and wealth. It preys on millions of victims in order to allocate valuable goods and services to its beneficiaries."
Hans F. Sennholz
"Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society."
Thomas Jefferson
"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt."
Herbert Hoover, US President - 1929
"Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important."
Eugene McCarthy, US Senator