The United States is probably the most [socially] mobile society in the history of the world. The virtues that are most valuable in it are diligence, discipline, ambition, and a willingness to take risks. Education and credentials are most important in government; elsewhere most skills are learned on the job.

If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.

Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism.

On every continent and in every epoch the peoples who have excelled in creating wealth have been the victims of some of society's greatest brutalities.

Surely women's liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained.

A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge

Entropy is Janus-faced. Its upside surprises are redemptive and favorable to freedom. It is freedom of choice. But the carrier itself requires constant vigilance against entropic noise. Order is not spontaneous, but it is a necessary condition for all the surprises of freedom and opportunity.