C.S. Friedman Quotes

The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.

The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest - sometimes with extensive borrowing - when and where matters of life and death are at stake.

When people went on vacation, they shed their home skins, thought they could be a new person.

The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.

Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.

People may surprise you with unexpected kindness. Dogs have a depth of loyalty that often we seem unworthy of. But the love of a cat is a blessing, a privilege in this world.

Politics is the only field in which the more experience you have, the worse you get.

You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.

Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill; it's against nature.

Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.

A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.

The important thing when it comes to grooming, as when it comes to clothes, is you do not want anything to distract from the strength and power of your ideas,.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

What makes it [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do.

Your boss doesn't care what you know, because the Google machine knows everything. Your boss cares about what you can do with what you know. That's the only thing your boss will pay for.

If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

I rarely meddled in the cat's personal affairs and she rarely meddled in mine. Neither of us was foolish enough to attribute human emotions to our pets.

God created whiskey to keep the Irish from taking over the world.

Whether your destination is heaven or hell, you always have to change planes in Dallas.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.

If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don't be surprised if you get unemployment.

With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.

I've got a head of hair better than Rick Perry; it's just not in a place I can show you.

So long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.

When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.

I've always believed the world would be a better place if more people everywhere have a chance to shape their own future and realize their full potential. I think that is what life is about.

Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.

There's a fine line between fiction and non-fiction and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979

The Democrats and Republicans are the same guy admiring themself in the mirror.

Hope and optimism aren't just attitudes, they are life strategies.

If you're paranoid long enough, sooner or later you're gonna be right.

I'm going to lower the drinking age to eighteen. If you're old enough to die in Iraq, you're old enough to drink.

No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's

I watched the land for as long as I could, until it disappeared behind its shawl of mist, and until I had it fixed in my mind - unchanged, mysterious and beautiful

I never apologize for the truth. And the truth here is that racists come in many different colors.

Remember, in China when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.

Friday night was the night most people thought they were supposed to have fun. Trouble was most people didn't know what fun was or how to have it, so things usually ended up pretty ugly.

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.

You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.

I am a libertarian with a small "l" and a Republican with a capital "R". And I am a Republican with a capital "R" on grounds of expediency, not on principle.