“It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.” 

“Seldom do people think things through foolishly. More often, they do not bother to think things through at all, so that even brainy individuals can reach untenable conclusions because their brainpower means little if it is not deployed and applied.” 

“No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.” 

“Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.” 

“The only people I truly envy are those who can play a musical instrument and those who can eat anything they want without gaining weight.” 

“The essence of bigotry is denying others the same rights you claim for yourself. Green bigots are a classic example.” 

“The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.” 

“Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right—creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.” 

“As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.” 

“Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.” 

“Reality does not go away when it is ignored.” 

“What is called “planning” in political rhetoric is the government’s suppression of other people’s plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties, armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these collective plans impose on others.” 

“The history of which peoples, nations, or civilizations have conquered or enslaved which other peoples, nations, or civilizations has been largely a history of who has been in a position to do so.” 

“…the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?” 

“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of our own ignorance.” 

“Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.” 

“. . ideology. . . is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure. —Jean-François Revel1” 

“President Obama keeps telling us that he is “creating jobs.” But more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many people have stopped looking for jobs. You are only counted as unemployed if you are still looking for a job.” 

“Many have blamed the gasoline shortages and long lines at filling stations in 1973 on the Arab Oil embargo of that year. However, the shortages and long lines began months before the Arab oil embargo, right after price controls were imposed.” 

“Nowhere in the world do you find this evenness that people use as a norm. And I find it fascinating that they will hold up as a norm something that has never been seen on this planet, and regard as an anomaly something that is seen in country after country.” 

“Misconceptions of business are almost inevitable in a society where most people have neither studied nor run businesses. In a society where most people are employees and consumers, it is easy to think of businesses as “them” – as impersonal organizations, whose internal operations are largely unknown and whose sums of money may sometimes be so huge as to be unfathomable.” 

“In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.” 

“Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.” 

“Should a professor of accounting or chemistry be fired for using up class time to sound off about homelessness or the war in Iraq? Yes! There is no high moral principle that prevents it. What prevents it are tenure rules that have saddled so many colleges with so many self-indulgent prima donnas who seem to think that they are philosopher kings, when in fact they are often grossly ignorant or misinformed outside the narrow confines of their particular specialty.” 

“Today, there are more people of Irish ancestry in the United States than in Ireland, more Jews than in Israel, more blacks than in most African countries. There are more people of Polish ancestry in Detroit than in most of the leading cities in Poland, and more than twice as many people of Italian ancestry in New York as in Venice.” 

“The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.” 

“People who want special taxes or subsidies for particular things seem not to understand that what they are really asking for is for the prices to misstate the relative scarcities of things and the relative values that the users of these things put on them. One” 

“As in the general society, fertility tends to be greatest where people are poorest: “The rich get richer, and the poor have children.”

“When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.” 

“We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.” 

“There have always been ignorant people, but they haven't always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.” 

“It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.” 

“People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.” 

“teachers who pander to minority students by turning their courses into rap sessions and ethnic navel-gazing exercises capture their interest and allegiance.” 

“Free-loading at emergency rooms—mandated by government—makes being uninsured a viable option.” 

“Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing—and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.” 

“Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.” 

“isolation is a recurring factor in poverty and backwardness around the world, whether that is physical isolation or cultural isolation, for any number of particular reasons” 

“No-one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.” 

“Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.” 

“The initial wealth of a group and its time of arrival are obviously important, as many wealthy “old families ” show, but the Jews arrived late and penniless in the nineteenth century and are now more affluent than any other ethnic group.” 

“To be sensitive, as ideologically defined, requires that one not merely accept but “affirm” other people’s way of life or even “celebrate” diversity in general. Like other demands for “sensitivity,” this demand offers no reason—unless fear of being disapproved, denounced, or harassed is a reason.” 

“If you have no right to disapprove, then your approval means nothing. It may indeed be distressing to someone to have you express your opinion that his lifestyle is disgusting and his art, music or writing is crude, shallow, or repugnant, but unless you are free to reach such conclusions, any praise you bestow is hollow and suspect.” 

“The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.” 

“In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools and colleges are producing artificial stupidity.” 

“The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.” 

“Justice at all costs' is not justice.” 

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” 

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” 

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”