One thing must be granted to the rich: they are goodnatured.

If I want to be free from any other man's dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control.

Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.

Whatever capital you divert to the support of a shiftless and good-for-nothing person is so much diverted from some other employment, and that means from somebody else. I would spend any conceivable amount of zeal and eloquence if I possessed it to try to make people grasp this idea. Capital is force. If it goes one way it cannot go another. If you give a loaf to a pauper you cannot give the same loaf to a laborer. Now this other man who would have got it but for the charitable sentiment which bestowed it on a worthless member of society is the Forgotten Man.

If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts.

There is no boon in nature. All the blessings we enjoy are the fruits of labor, toil, self-denial, and study.

We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.