Short-sighted and impatient efforts to wipe out poverty by severing the connection between effort and reward can only lead to the growth of a totalitarian state, and destroy the economic progress that this country has so dearly bought.

In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.

Give me the clear blue sky above my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner - and then to thinking!

The only real cure for poverty is production.

The more 'adequate' we make relief, the more people we are going to find willing to get on it and stay on it indefinitely. The more we try to make sure that everybody really in need of relief gets it, the more certain we can be that we are also giving it to people who neither need nor deserve it.

We are so accustomed to the miracle of private enterprise that we habitually take it for granted. But how does private industry solve the incredibly complex problem of turning out tens of thousands of different goods and services in the proportions in which they are wanted by the public? ... It solves these problems through the institutions of private property, competition, the free market, and the existence of money - through the interrelations of supply and demand, costs and prices, profits and losses.

There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy.