My work on human capital began with an effort to calculate both private and social rates of return to men, women, blacks, and other groups from investments in different levels of education.

I am saying that the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour

Economy is the art of making the most of life.

Even a wizard would have a great deal of difficulty repealing the economic law that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Since politicians are not wizards, they should not try.

Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.

Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time.

Still, intuitive assumptions about behavior is only the starting point of systematic analysis, for alone they do not yield many interesting implications.

The most fundamental constraint is limited time

I was not sympathetic to the assumption that criminals had radically different motivations from everyone else.

The Treatise tries to analyze not only modern Western families, but also those in other cultures and the changes in family structure during the past several centuries.

Why in almost all societies have married women specialized in bearing and rearing children and in certain agricultural activities, whereas married men have done most of the fighting and market work?

Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.

As long as you're not hurting anyone or anything, including your future self, do only that which makes you happy.

An editor asked me what led me to write erotica. I replied, "A dirty mind, excess words, and an overactive sacral chakra.

Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.

Spin is overrated. It is strategy, not spin, that wins elections.

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

Memory is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been laid aside out of sight.

Civil disobedience is a lever which can move the world by using peace as a fulcrum.

If you were your own employer, would you be entirely satisfied with the day’s work you have done today?

And in the gunslinger's mind, those words echoed: You dare not.