"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary."

"Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men."

"Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom."

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."

"Does anything [Obama] says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?"

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.

Have I not said that, if they [labour] know their power and use it wisely and constructively, they will become the real rulers and the employers will be their trustees and friends in need and deed? This happy state of things will come only when they know that labour is more real capital than the capital in the shape of gold and silver which labour extracts from the bowels of the earth.

"Hollywood is capitalism at its best: opposing forces working it out, using tools of the marketplace. As such, it`s vastly messier than totalitarianism, but it kills a lot less people."

"I observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money; but that nonetheless people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day in rather wonderful and privileged circumstances. We are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired - in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution."

[when asked to comment on adapting his own work for the screen]

"It`s like raping your children to teach them about sex."