Thomas H. Barber: The essential quality of a free economy is that it cannot be planned. It leaves the solution of problems to the inspiration of the individuals in the untrammeled population. When something approaching a free economy has existed, it has always worked better than the schemes of any planners.
Winston Churchill (1903): We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
Calvin Coolidge: Economy is the method by which today we prepare to afford the improvements of tomorrow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.
Milton Friedman: It's impossible to do good with other people's money.
Milton Friedman: The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
Friedrich Hayek: The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Henry Hazlitt: The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
Ernest Hemingway: The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. Frederic Bastiat (Economic Philosopher): By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others. Economic Harmonies, par. 4.110
Thomas Jefferson: I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared.
Nikita Kruschev: Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one's wishes.
Ludwig von Mises: Freedom, Democracy, Peace and Private Property are deemed good because they are the best means for promoting human happiness and welfare. Liberalism wants to secure to man a life free from fear and want. That's all. (Omnipotent Government, 1944).
Ludwig von Mises: The meaning of economic freedom is this: that the individual is in a position to choose the way in which he wants to integrate himself into the totality of society.
Ludwig von Mises: Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrpeneurs of tomorrow...
Peter, in Family Guy: Here, go buy yourself some more money.
Ayn Rand: America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.
Ayn Rand: 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: Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Ayn Rand: Run for your life from any man who tells you money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
Joseph J. Schumpeter: Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.
Adam Smith: 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. (An Inquiry... Wealth of Nations, 1776).
Thomas Sowell: The first lesson of economics is scarcity; there is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Walter Williams: Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one's fellow man … that's what competition is all about: "out-pleasing" your competitors to win over the consumers.