• Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

• Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

• The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

• People fo privilage will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

• Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

• Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

• The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

• One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

• Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

• In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.

• Washington is a place where people praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

• If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

• Few people at the beginning of the ninteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

• In economics, the majority is always wrong.

• A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

• Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention. But it has no persuasive value at all.

• The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.

• Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.

• The salary of the chief executive of the large corporations is not an award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm gesture by the individual to himself.

• Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

• Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

• In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

• Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

• Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

• You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

• It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.

• Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.