The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.

In capitalist enterprise there is no secure income and no security of wealth.

Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will

The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody...It is not in the power of the government to make everybody more prosperous.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.

The early industrialists were for the most part men who had their origin in the same social strata from which their workers came. They lived very modestly, spent only a fraction of their earnings for their households and put the rest back into the business.

Economic progress is the work of the savers, who accumulate capital, and of the entrepreneurs, who turn capital to new uses.