Fundamentally, there are only to ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion — the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation — the technique of the marketplace.

We don’t choose to be role models; we are chosen. Our only choice is whether to be a good role model or a bad one.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution; it represents the wide choice of many alternatives.

There is a force that somehow pushes us to choose the more difficult path whereby we can transcend the mire and muck into which we are so often born. Despite all that resists the process, we do become better human beings.

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.

In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.

Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves . . . But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.

If you want the cooperation of humans around you, you must make them feel they are important, and you do that by being genuine and humble.

You should respect each other and refrain from disputes; you should not, like water and oil, repel each other, but should, like milk and water, mingle together.

Honor bespeaks worth. Confidence begets trust. Service brings satisfaction. Cooperation proves the quality of leadership.

Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely enjoy exercising authority usually lose it.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within solitude of his own heart.

Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt.

Freedom exists not to do what you like but to have the right to do what you ought.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to allow his vision wherever it takes him.

One man thinks himself the master of others but remains more of a slave than they are.

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the “common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.

Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it. All that is not a true change will disappear in the future society.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: "This is my country."

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bond together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.