“The state — or, to make matters more concrete, the government — consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting ‘A’ to satisfy ‘B’. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods.”

“Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

“There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters”

“You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for that my dear friend is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”

“At one level, the Opposition's most urgent job, between now and the next election, is to publicise the government's mistakes. Randolph Churchill once declared that oppositions should oppose everything, propose nothing and turf the government out. He was right in this fundamental respect: the opposition's job is to get elected. Intelligent oppositions have no unnecessary enemies. They make the government rather than themselves the issue by ensuring that everyone harmed by government decisions well and truly knows about it.”

“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to bemanaged by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and ofthe people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has thecapacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear theburden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higherprice.”