Top 70 John Stossel Quotes
#1. Companies don't get rich hurting their customers.
John Stossel
#2. What private property does is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce for more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.
John Stossel
#3. Patrick Henry did not say, 'Give me absolutely safety or give me death.' America is supposed to be about freedom.
John Stossel
#4. I had to watch government fail for 25 years doing consumer reporting before I really saw it because intuitively, the reaction is problem, bring government and government will make it better.
John Stossel
#5. People like getting what they think is free stuff from government.
John Stossel
#6. Markets are too complex to manipulate beneficially.
John Stossel
#7. The happiest stutterers, I learned, are those who are willing to stutter in front of others.
John Stossel
#8. Give me a break - They say taxes are inevitable, like death. At least death doesn't come every year.
John Stossel
#9. I won't ever got to a place that's racist, and I will tell everybody else not to and I'll speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist.
John Stossel
#10. I never wanted to be an anchor for 25 years, and suddenly I wanted to be one.
John Stossel
#11. There is all of this protesting against corporate power, but in reality, corporations have to persuade you - they could have a ton of money, but actually only government can use force.
John Stossel
#13. Nothing keeps a company honest and efficient like the threat of other companies coming along and taking its business away.
John Stossel
#14. No transaction happens unless it is voluntary. It only happens if both of you think you win.
John Stossel
#15. As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and self-serving.
John Stossel
#16. When entrepreneurs are free to compete, they grow the pie so that everyone's share gets larger.
John Stossel
#17. We have all kinds of government compensation systems that are much more efficient than the lawyers.
John Stossel
#18. I was bullied as a kid, and I got a job on television. And I had a camera. And so I wanted to go after those business bullies. And I just have been following that instinct.
John Stossel
#19. Government has no money of its own. All it does is take resources from one group and given them to another.
John Stossel
#20. When we were scared about 9/11, we federalized the airport security, we spent millions for body armor for dogs in Ohio. All that over-reaction comes from fear and government - bad combination.
John Stossel
#21. Private businesses ought to get to discriminate.
John Stossel
#22. Asking someone in the media about liberal bias is like asking a fish about water. 'Huh, what are you talking about? Where is it?'
John Stossel
#23. Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money?
John Stossel
#24. All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.
John Stossel
#25. Unions say, 'Education of the children is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market.' The opposite is true. Education is too important to be left to the calcified union/government monopoly.
John Stossel
#26. Where I live in Manhattan and where I work at ABC, people say 'conservative' the way people say 'child molester.'
John Stossel
#27. Prosperity comes from leaving people free in a legal system that respects their persons and property so they can pursue their dreams while taking responsibility for their actions.
John Stossel
#29. Liberalism had come to mean spending more on everything-speech police, failed poverty programs that reward dependence, a bigger nanny state telling us we cannot eat fatty foods, workplace roles that stifle opportunity, and absurd environmental regulations.
John Stossel
#30. I was ashamed for people to see me struggle.
John Stossel
#31. Current government regulation interferes with honest voluntary exchanges by imposing arbitrary terms and requiring tons of paperwork disclosing information no one wants anyway.
John Stossel
#32. If government were less important in our lives, politicians would have fewer goodies to trade. In return, we'd have more money and more freedom.
John Stossel
#33. You can either invade a country or leave them alone and trade with them. When goods cross borders, armies don't.
John Stossel
#34. Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over.
John Stossel
#35. Living with the liberals, you get to hear their arguments, fight with them all the time. Keeps me alert.
John Stossel
#37. Why, in our 'free' country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?
John Stossel
#38. It's not about electing the right people. It's about a narrowing their responsibilities.
John Stossel
#39. Madoff's scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare.
John Stossel
#40. David Boaz has been my guide to the history, economics, and politics of freedom for years.
John Stossel
#41. A conservative is a libertarian who has been mugged.
John Stossel
#42. I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse.
John Stossel
#43. Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose.
John Stossel
#44. Fraud will always exist. Enforcement of anti-fraud laws is a useful deterrent, but in the end there's no substitute for investor vigilance. Government regulations provide a false sense of security - and that's worth less than no sense of security at all.
John Stossel
#45. A system that rewards politicians skilled at campaigning - which is the art of creating an illusion - and that puts hundreds of billions of coerced taxpayer dollars at the disposal of the winners will tend to attract men and women with a comparative advantage in manipulation.
John Stossel
#46. A thousand restaurants close every month. They re-open, and that's good for America. Nobody's rescuing them. They employ people, too. If we let them go bankrupt, the factories don't go away, the creative people don't go away. They get employed more productively by others.
John Stossel
#47. Isn't allowing people a choice what America is all about?
John Stossel
#48. The people who tried government regulation have lives which are miserable.
John Stossel
#49. I saw how the regulation I called for made things worse, didn't help consumers and simple competition was better. And I started praising business and occasionally criticizing regulation.
John Stossel
#50. What I've learned in 40 years of consumer reporting is that the market is imperfect, and some people get ripped off.
John Stossel
#51. Saying that government is not the way to solve problems is not saying that humanity cannot solve its problems. What I've finally learned is this: Despite the obstacles created by governments, voluntary networks of private individuals - through voluntary exchange - solve all sorts of challenges.
John Stossel
#52. I've built my career on unpaid interns, and the interns told me it was great - I learned more from you than I did in college.
John Stossel
#53. There's no business that's too small for government to torture
John Stossel
#54. People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world.
John Stossel
#55. A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system.
John Stossel
#56. The politicians should not tell the people to shut up.
John Stossel
#57. Many people are priced out of the medical and insurance markets for one reason: the politicians refusal to give up power. Allowing them to seize another 16 percent of the economy won't solve our problems. Freedom will.
John Stossel
#58. The one thing I've learned is that stuttering in public is never as bad as I fear it will be.
John Stossel
#59. Take away the government's monopoly, and private groups will do it better.
John Stossel
#60. As a free person, I ought to be allowed if I'm dying to take something.
John Stossel
#61. The people who have the biggest passion for restricting other people's behavior are the very people we should worry about most. Unfortunately, they keep running for office.
John Stossel
#62. [T]he only way to shrink the trade deficit is for the government to prohibit us from buying whatever we want.
John Stossel
#63. Government is so big today that more than half the population gets a major part of its income from the state.
John Stossel
#64. I'm an American. I'm for prosperity. I've discovered, from 40 years of reporting, that what creates prosperity is limited government.
John Stossel
#65. To finance 'entitlement' programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy?
John Stossel
#66. Central authority is bad. The bias should be for freedom. And without a central authority, there are lots of little authorities, and we learn which ones to trust.
John Stossel
#68. If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else.
John Stossel
#69. Competition leads both drug companies and private regulators to be trustworthy. If they are not trustworthy, they die.
John Stossel
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