"When a government takes over a people's economic life it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute, it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs."
--Maxwell Anderson
"Some of the same people who laugh at gypsy fortune tellers take economists seriously."
--William DeFoe
"[Prosperity] knits a man to the world. He thinks he's 'finding his place in it,' while really it is finding its place in him."
--C.S. Lewis
"There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder."
--Ronald Reagan
"One definition of an economist is somebody who sees something happen in practice and wonders if it will work in theory."
--Ronald Reagan
"Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws."
--Baron M.A. Rothschild, (1744 - 1812)
"It is the highest impertinence and presumption...in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense.... They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will."
--Adam Smith
"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations."
--Adam Smith
Page last updated 2001-05-18