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"What values did Washington's character express? He was a farmer, a businessman, an enthusiast for commerce. As a man of the Enlightenment, he was deeply interested in scientific farming. His letters on running Mount Vernon are longer than letters on running the government. (Of course, in 1795 more people worked at Mount Vernon than in the entire executive branch of the federal government.)" David Boaz   "In 2009, the net worth of households headed by adults ages 65 and older was a record 47 times that of households headed by adults under the age of 35—a wealth gap that doubled just since 2005." George Will   "The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new." Samuel Johnson   "There is no other means of producing leisure. Machinery and modern civilization are thus indispensable for emancipating man from leading the life of a brute, and for providing him with leisure and for making a life of culture possible. The man who condemns machinery and modern civilization simply does not understand their purpose and the ultimate aim which human society must strive to achieve." Bhimrao Ambedkar   "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Friedrich Hayek   "Almost all redistributive rhetoric urges people to dwell on the negative—you or other people aren't getting what is due. This in turn makes people want to 'do something' about the problem. And you can rest assured that no matter how much redistribution there is, egalitarians will never say 'Ok, life's fair now. We're done complaining.' No, what they foster is literally a lifestyle of ingratitude—a recipe for unhappiness." Bryan Caplan   "Economists are often accused of believing that everything—health, happiness, life itself—can be measured in money. What we actually believe is even odder. We believe that everything can be measured in anything." David Friedman   "As it planted no crops, kept no herds, and hoarded virtually no food, it required huge areas of terrain and remarkable ingenuity and skill to support relatively few people. We rightly talk of the wastefulness of our industrial civilization but—and this may sound heretical—the nomadic way of life was more wasteful." Geoffrey Blainey   "When the state is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied." Tacitus   "If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don't you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don't you see that they must capture the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it? Must capture the government? They have already captured it." Woodrow Wilson   "You can be a Keynesian, create havoc, and claim that the havoc would have been worse without you." Peter Smith   "This century is one of the lowest points in the history of art, even lower than the eighteenth century when there was no great art, just frivolity. Twentieth century art is a mere light pastime, as though we were living in a merry period, despite all the wars we've had as part of the decoration." Marcel Duchamp   "Let us seek first of all frugality in government—peace and freedom we will have as a bonus." Frederic Bastiat   "In the United States in 1850, life expectancy was just under 40 years at birth. When it increased to 47 years in 1900, some doomsayers thought that it was a statistical blip. But as it reached close to 54 years in 1920, it became clear that the United States was doing something right." Richard Epstein   "The real scientific definition of Communism, based on experience, is queues, endless queues." Pitrim Sorokin   "I love every 'lib' movement there is, because after the 'lib' the things that were always a mystique become understandable and boring, and then nobody has to feel left out if they're not part of what is happening. For instance, single people looking for husbands and wives used to feel left out because the image marriage had in the old days was so wonderful. Jane Wyatt and Robert Young. Nick and Nora Charles. Ethel and Fred Mertz. Dagwood and Blondie." Andy Warhol   "Plato's philosophy is the most savage and most profound attack upon liberal ideas which history can show." Richard Crossman   "A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life." Theodore Roosevelt   "God has left all men free; Nature has made none a slave." Alcidimas   "Condorcet described America as of all nations 'the most enlightened, the freest and the least burdened by prejudices.' Its respect for human rights, he wrote, was a lesson for all the peoples of the world. He offered what would be the characteristic praise of America, where there were 'no distinctions of class' and where property was secure and industry and hard work encouraged. There was no spiritual or political aristocracy in America, he wrote, 'to hold a part of the human race in a state of humiliation, simplicity, and misery.' Diderot, in turn, saw America as 'offering all the inhabitants of Europe an asylum against fanaticism and tyranny.' For Turgot the American people were 'the hope of the human race, they may well become its model.'" Isaac Kramnick   "The mark of intellectuals is, or should be, their ability to reach conclusions that don't suit their prejudices." Clive James   "The front experience of Private Hitler consisted more in the consumption of artificial honey and tea than of the participation in any combat. He was separated from the actual combat zone by a zone some 10 kilometres deep. Thousands of family fathers would have filled Hitler's little post behind the front just as well as him: however, at the time Hitler did not display any sign that he felt driven towards military front-line action, as he is trying to tell the blinded German youth today." Josef Stettner   "Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them." Thomas Stearns Eliot   "If there had been Nobel prizes for science, medicine and literature in that epoch, Alexandria would have been the home of more prize-winners than any other city. And yet all this ingenuity did not transform the daily work of a civilization in which the slave served as the all-purpose machine. Alexandria and other Greek cities probably capable of making many of the steps which constituted, just over 2000 years later, the industrial revolution; but they had no need for an industrial revolution." Geoffrey Blainey   "In high doses, alcohol impairs our reaction times, muscle control, co-ordination, short-term memory, perceptual field, cognitive abilities and ability to speak clearly. But it does not cause us selectively to break specific social rules." Kate Fox   "The Australian Aborigines were not only polygynous but gerontocratic as well: in Arnhem Land the sexual monopoly of young girls enjoyed by senile elders has been a source of high tension for years. Among small groups like the Bushmen of southern Africa or the Yanomamo of Venezuela, strong leaders might keep up to ten women for their use. Polynesian chiefs traditionally kept up to a hundred women, while—as in the old-time West African kingdom of Dahomey—thousands and even tens of thousands of women were made available to the leaders of ancient empires like Mesopotamia and Egypt, or India and China, not to mention Aztec Mexico or Inca Peru." Roger Sandall   "All I am arguing about is that, where you can create a competitive condition, you ought to rely on competition." Friedrich Hayek   "When I took office, I inherited a heavy load of serious economic problems besides energy, and we've met them all head-on. We've slashed government regulations and put free enterprise back into the airlines, the trucking and the financial systems of our country, and we're now doing the same thing for the railroads." Jimmy Carter   "These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing." Barney Frank   "The exercise of power for one's own advantage is characteristic of the tyrant and, as Aristotle indicates, of the master. The pursuit of personal gain or one's own exclusive needs can be regarded as base, alternatively as menial or tyrannical. Yet all free men are expected to pursue their own good, not abstract duty or obligation. The democratic polis enables each citizen to do as he likes and this free interaction somehow both yields the collective good (so that to be ruled is not to be exploited or tyrannized) and constitutes an order which displays those virtues associated with the aristocracy." Cynthia Farrar   "They were the last people of Europe to resist Christianity. There are Viking gravestones from quite late in the Middle Ages that have symbols of Wotan on one side and Christian symbols on the other—what is called hedging your bets." Kenneth Clark