Responsibility is the ability to respond.

One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn't pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore you faith in yourself.

The way to stay young is to live honestly, eat slowly and lie about your age.

I would rather regret the things I have done than the things I have not

I'm not funny. What I am is brave.

I wanted to get out of the pictures and stay home so that I could have children.

How to do half-hour comedy innovatively is something I do pride myself on. We invented it with 'I Love Lucy.'

I've seen 'Mork & Mindy' a couple times. Robin Williams amazes me. And I love Gary Coleman. He puts me away. He puts everybody away.

I dyed my hair this crazy red to bid for attention. It has become a trademark, and I've got to keep it this way.

How I Love Lucy was born? We decided that instead of divorce lawyers profiting from our mistakes, we'd profit from them.

Use a make-up table with everything close at hand and don't rush; otherwise you'll look like a patchwork quilt.

You spell Bob Hope C-L-A-S-S.

I regret the passing of the studio system. I was very appreciative of it because I had no talent.

TV started for me just as a means of keeping my husband Desi off the road. He'd been on tour with his band since he got out of the Army, and we were in our 11th year of marriage and wanted to have children.

I will never do another TV series. It couldn't top I Love Lucy, and I'd be foolish to try. In this business, you have to know when to get off.

I think knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can.

Women's Lib? Oh, I'm afraid it doesn't interest me one bit. I've been so liberated it hurts.

I don't know how to tell a joke. I never tell jokes. I can tell stories that happened to me... anecdotes. But never a joke.

You see much more of your children once they leave home.

Ability is of little account without opportunity.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

I am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.

I'm sometimes scared of everything that has happened to us. We didn't think Desilu Productions would grow so big. We merely wanted to be together and have two children.

If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do.

Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work - and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't.

A man who correctly guesses a woman's age may be smart, but he's not very bright.

In life, all good things come hard, but wisdom is the hardest to come by.

The more things you do, the more you can do.

I'm not sure that I want to be without some lack of confidence. If you are too sure of yourself, you don't grow. You may feel confident in some things, but other fields come up as a challenge. And if you don't anticipate trouble, you will be in trouble.

I don't think you should write a book until you tell the absolute truth. You can't do that until you're 85, and I don't want to live that long. I've always prided myself on knowing when to get off, and I hope it works out that way.

Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.

All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.

The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.

Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization

He who only wishes and hopes does not interfere actively with the course of events and with the shaping of his own destiny.

The masses do not like those who surpass them in any regard. The average man envies and hates those who are different.

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

The alcoholic and the drug addict harm only themselves by their behavior; the person who violates the rules of morality governing mans life in society harms not only himself, but everyone.

All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out

Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will

Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect—better because they alone give promise of final success.

The average man is both better informed and less corruptible in the decisions he makes as a consumer than as a voter at political elections.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.

The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the F hrer principle.

Against what is stupid, nonsensical, erroneous, and evil, [classical] liberalism fights with the weapons of the mind, and not with brute force and repression.

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.