"The Americans enjoy explaining almost every act of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood. It gives them pleasure to point out how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state. I think that in this they frequently fail to do themselves justice; for in the United States as well as elsewhere people are sometimes seen to give way to those disinterested and spontaneous impulses that are natural to man; but the Americans seldom admit that they yield to emotions of this kind; they are more anxious to do honour to their philosophy than to themselves."

"The inventor is not a disinterested sage, labouring for posterity out of pure love of knowledge. He is a man who has seen a problem and believes he can solve it; who has glimpsed an opportunity and wishes to seize it; who desires recognition, comfort, perhaps glory. These are perfectly ordinary human desires. And it is precisely because they are ordinary that they are reliable. The inventor works because he hopes to benefit from his invention. Remove that hope, and you remove the invention."

"Society as a whole observes that circumstances are changing, that production conditions are evolving, and that by responding to them in an enlightened manner, additional wealth becomes accessible. This recognition that improvements are possible aligns with the great idea of human perfectibility: the conviction that the golden age lies not in the past but in the future."

"The collectivist state cannot reward innovation, because it has abolished the mechanism by which innovation is rewarded: the profit that accrues to whoever first brings a new product or a new method to market. It cannot punish the failure to innovate, because it has abolished the mechanism by which such failure is punished: the loss that overtakes whoever persists in inferior methods when better ones are available. It is therefore condemned, not by the wickedness of its administrators, but by the logic of its own organisation, to reproduce yesterday's mistakes indefinitely."

"In semi-collectivist societies, innovation must come from the free sectors, as it is impossible to innovate in the monopolized sectors of public services. The postal system will not invent the telegraph; the state railway will not invent the automobile. Progress will always come from outside, from the interstices of freedom that the system has not yet managed to fill."

"In our age, the name of Watt is as celebrated as that of Wellington; the name of Stephenson is spoken with as much respect as that of any general. This is new. In ancient Egypt, the inventor of a new process was required to submit it to the priests for approval, and the approval was rarely forthcoming. In the guild system of the Middle Ages, the artisan who introduced a new technique was threatened with ruin and sometimes with violence by his fellow craftsmen. Freedom has done this: it has made progress honorable."