The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large.

What would the people who sold us goods do with the money? They'd get dollars. What would they do with the dollars? Eat them?!

The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years.

You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day's toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world.

The rule of law does not guarantee freedom, since general law as well as personal edicts can be tyrannical. But increasing reliance on the rule of law clearly played a major role in transforming Western society from a world in which the ordinary citizen was literally subject to the arbitrary will of his master to a world in which the ordinary citizen could regard himself as his own master

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.