Top 100 Stossel Quotes
#1. It's not about electing the right people. It's about a narrowing their responsibilities.
John Stossel
#2. I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.
Scott Stossel
#3. Even though my mom herself was anxious, I think she didn't know how to deal with it in her kid, and my dad just had no conception of what this was about, and sort of didn't even want to acknowledge it.
Scott Stossel
#4. Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose.
John Stossel
#6. 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
#7. A conservative is a libertarian who has been mugged.
John Stossel
#8. David Boaz has been my guide to the history, economics, and politics of freedom for years.
John Stossel
#9. To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.
Scott Stossel
#10. Madoff's scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare.
John Stossel
#11. I have, since the age of about 2, been a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses. And I have, since the age of 10, when I was first taken to a mental hospital for evaluation and then referred to a psychiatrist for treatment, tried in various ways to overcome my anxiety.
Scott Stossel
#12. As recently as 1979, neither panic attacks nor panic disorder officially existed.
Scott Stossel
#13. During high school, I would purposely lose tennis and squash matches to escape the agony of anxiety that competitive situations would provoke in me.
Scott Stossel
#15. Why, in our 'free' country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?
John Stossel
#17. Living with the liberals, you get to hear their arguments, fight with them all the time. Keeps me alert.
John Stossel
#18. To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck
paddling, paddling, paddling.
Scott Stossel
#19. 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
#20. There are lots of things, including changing the kind of inner dialog, that can mitigate anxiety. And yes, there are people who have the glass half full and glass half empty, and I'm afraid the glass is going to break and I'll cut myself on the shards.
Scott Stossel
#21. One challenge is trying to extend access to more poorly served communities in rural areas and in the inner city. Sometimes you have kids who are suffering from trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, and they have no way of getting access to the remedies that are available to them.
Scott Stossel
#22. You can either invade a country or leave them alone and trade with them. When goods cross borders, armies don't.
John Stossel
#24. Even as economic and political freedoms have advanced enormously and generated huge benefits for humanity, they've also created a great deal of anxiety because every time you have to make a choice, there's anxiety about making the wrong one.
Scott Stossel
#25. When I was 5 and my sister was 3, we went on a family trip, and she ate cheese off the floor at an airport. My mother, a germaphobe, got very upset. My sister, of course, got a stomach virus, and ever since then, I have an aversion to cheese.
Scott Stossel
#26. There's no business that's too small for government to torture
John Stossel
#27. 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
#28. A panic attack is interesting the way a broken leg or a kidney stone is interesting - a pain that you want to end.
Scott Stossel
#29. As a free person, I ought to be allowed if I'm dying to take something.
John Stossel
#30. To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.
Scott Stossel
#31. Many nights, I would begin the evening fueled by caffeine and nicotine, which I needed to propel me out of torpor and hopelessness - only to overshoot into quaking, quivering anxiety.
Scott Stossel
#32. Take away the government's monopoly, and private groups will do it better.
John Stossel
#33. The one thing I've learned is that stuttering in public is never as bad as I fear it will be.
John Stossel
#34. 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
#35. The politicians should not tell the people to shut up.
John Stossel
#36. A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system.
John Stossel
#37. People who suffer from anxiety are very good at hiding it. That can often be a contributor to the anxiety because the gap between the internal perception and the external impression can feel so large.
Scott Stossel
#38. People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world.
John Stossel
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#43. Barbra Streisand developed overwhelming performance anxiety at the height of her career; for 27 years she refused to perform for the general public, appearing live only in private clubs and at charity events, where she presumably believed the pressure on her was less intense.
Scott Stossel
#44. What I've learned in 40 years of consumer reporting is that the market is imperfect, and some people get ripped off.
John Stossel
#45. 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
#46. The people who tried government regulation have lives which are miserable.
John Stossel
#47. Isn't allowing people a choice what America is all about?
John Stossel
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Give me a break - They say taxes are inevitable, like death. At least death doesn't come every year.
John Stossel
#52. 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
#53. Generally speaking, the anxiety will pass, which is easy for me to say when I'm not in the middle of an anxiety attack. When you're in the throes of one, it's hard to feel anything other than utter misery and terror.
Scott Stossel
#54. No transaction happens unless it is voluntary. It only happens if both of you think you win.
John Stossel
#55. I had no trouble with strangers finding out about my anxiety. It was my friends and colleagues I was concerned about.
Scott Stossel
#56. Nothing keeps a company honest and efficient like the threat of other companies coming along and taking its business away.
John Stossel
#57. There's a vast encyclopedia of fears and phobias, and pretty much any object, experience, situation you can think of, there is someone who has a phobia of it.
Scott Stossel
#59. 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
#60. I never wanted to be an anchor for 25 years, and suddenly I wanted to be one.
John Stossel
#61. 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
#62. Carly Simon abandoned the stage for seven years after collapsing from nerves before a concert in Pittsburgh in 1981. When she resumed performing, she would sometimes ask members of her band to spank her before she went onstage, to distract her from her anxiety.
Scott Stossel
#64. social phobics are better at picking up on subtle social cues than other people are - but they tend to overinterpret anything that could be construed as a negative reaction.
Scott Stossel
#65. The fear of vomiting, which for me is one of the most original and most acute of my fears, is actually fairly common. Emetophobia, it's called, and by some estimates, it's the fifth most common specific phobia.
Scott Stossel
#66. All the textbooks talk about avoidance as a classic hallmark of anxiety disorder. So you need a therapist who is sympathetic and understanding but will also push you to do precisely the things that scare you.
Scott Stossel
#67. The happiest stutterers, I learned, are those who are willing to stutter in front of others.
John Stossel
#68. Markets are too complex to manipulate beneficially.
John Stossel
#69. People like getting what they think is free stuff from government.
John Stossel
#70. I wanted to put a human face on anxiety disorders. I thought people who suffer from anxiety might recognize themselves and gain some comfort from my story and for those who don't suffer from anxiety disorders gain some understanding.
Scott Stossel
#71. There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.
Scott Stossel
#72. 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
#73. Some people say that in stressful situations I can seem unflappable, and I think that's partly because I'm always kind of internally flapped.
Scott Stossel
#74. Patrick Henry did not say, 'Give me absolutely safety or give me death.' America is supposed to be about freedom.
John Stossel
#75. 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
#76. Private businesses ought to get to discriminate.
John Stossel
#77. There is an element in which anxiety co-represents with aspects of my personality I wouldn't want to give up. It allows you to have foresight. I may not be as empathetic. It's hard to figure out the difference between pathology and personality.
Scott Stossel
#78. 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
#79. I was ashamed for people to see me struggle.
John Stossel
#80. 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
#82. 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
#83. Where I live in Manhattan and where I work at ABC, people say 'conservative' the way people say 'child molester.'
John Stossel
#84. 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
#85. All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.
John Stossel
#86. Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money?
John Stossel
#87. During first grade, I spent nearly every afternoon for months in the school nurse's office, sick with psychosomatic headaches, begging to go home; by third grade, stomachaches had replaced the headaches, but my daily trudge to the infirmary remained the same.
Scott Stossel
#88. 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
#89. Companies don't get rich hurting their customers.
John Stossel
#90. 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
#91. Hugh Grant, who several times has announced that he was thinking of retiring from acting, has said that he suffers from panic attacks when the cameras start rolling.
Scott Stossel
#92. Government has no money of its own. All it does is take resources from one group and given them to another.
John Stossel
#93. 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
#95. An astonishing portion of my life is built around trying to evade vomiting and preparing for the eventuality that I might.
Scott Stossel
#97. The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture.
Scott Stossel
#98. We have all kinds of government compensation systems that are much more efficient than the lawyers.
John Stossel
#99. When entrepreneurs are free to compete, they grow the pie so that everyone's share gets larger.
John Stossel
#100. My parents were not perfect, but no one's parents are. As childhoods go, mine was pretty comfortable and good in a lot of ways, and yet I still ended up with anxiety.
Scott Stossel
