108 Quotes by Walter E. Williams

Some say it's wrong to profit from the misfortune of others. I ask my students whether they'd support a law against doing so. But I caution them with some examples. An orthopedist profits from your misfortune of having broken your leg skiing. When there's news of a pending ice storm, I doubt whether it saddens the hearts of those in the collision repair business. I also tell my students that I profit from their misfortune—their ignorance of economic theory.

But let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you - and why?

A caged canary is safe but not free.

Europeans are a people with little willingness to defend themselves. They are people who believe that peace treaties, appeasement, and disarmament produce peace.

There are people in need of help. Charity is one of the nobler human motivations. The act of reaching into one’s own pockets to help a fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else’s pocket is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, “in government, the scum rises to the top”.

I lost the job because one of Jack’s employees complained to the department of labor that he was in violation of child labor laws.

A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, ‘Delay, Denial and Dilution,’ written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care.

The public good is promoted best by people pursuing their own private interests. This bothers some people because they’re more concerned with motives than with results.