"Free enterprise" cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.

The basis for political economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply.

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

The great dialectic of our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.

You show me a capitalist, I'll show you a bloodsucker.

The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.

The capitalists prohibit the utilization of new inventions, buying them up to avoid the loss of their investment in existing facilities. They are interested in increased productivity and in technical progress only as profits can thereby be maintained or increased.

We need a free economy not only for the renewed material prosperity it will bring, but because it is indispensable to individual freedom, human dignity and to a more just, more honest society.

Far from being a classless society, Communism is governed by an elite as steadfast in its determination to maintain its prerogatives as any oligarchy known to history.

... How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts a boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement?

It doesn't matter a jot if three-fourths of mankind perish! The only thing that matters is that, in the end, the remaining fourth should become communist.

[Communism is] the opiate of the intellectuals ... but no cure, except as a guillotine might be called a cure for a case of dandruff.

Revolutionary Marxism ... offers only to "redistribute" the results--the money, maybe--of this industrialization to a wider section of the population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around; but in order to do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system.

We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.

A red is any son-of-a-bitch who wants thirty cents when we're payin' twenty-five.

In the long run, I believe that communism will fail to captivate mankind because ... communism has very little spiritual help or guidance to offer to men and women in the personal trials and troubles of their individual lives.

Communism terribly overestimated how much humanity could be changed from the top down through enforced social engineering, while it fatally underestimated the corruptibility of the self-appointed elites who would carry out the utopian task. ...

Workers of the world, forgive me.

Are we never to learn that Socialism has its roots in envy and in nothing else?

The fundamental point that democratic socialists have always made remains as true today and as relevant as ever: That human needs must come first; that people are more important than profits; and that some things--health, housing, food, education--which are essential for human survival and dignity must be guaranteed as human rights.

What the collectivist age wants, allows, and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.

By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it.

Socialism ... is too ready to suppose that better economic conditions will of themselves make men happy. It is not only more material goods that men need, but more freedom, more self-direction, more outlet for creativeness, more opportunity for the joy of life, more voluntary cooperation and less involuntary subservience to purposes not their own.

All socialism is slavery. ... That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires.