Top 92 Quotes & Sayings by John Stossel

Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose.

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.

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.

People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world.

When entrepreneurs are free to compete, they grow the pie so that everyone's share gets larger.

The one thing I've learned is that stuttering in public is never as bad as I fear it will be.

Patrick Henry did not say, 'Give me absolutely safety or give me death.' America is supposed to be about freedom.

I was ashamed for people to see me struggle.

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.

I'm an American. I'm for prosperity. I've discovered, from 40 years of reporting, that what creates prosperity is limited government.

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.

I was a closet stutterer.

The happiest stutterers, I learned, are those who are willing to stutter in front of others.

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.

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.

Private businesses ought to get to discriminate.

Companies don't get rich hurting their customers.

I'm a libertarian. It's a terrible word.

Living with the liberals, you get to hear their arguments, fight with them all the time. Keeps me alert.

As a free person, I ought to be allowed if I'm dying to take something.

Isn't allowing people a choice what America is all about?

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.

The people who tried government regulation have lives which are miserable.

Competition leads both drug companies and private regulators to be trustworthy. If they are not trustworthy, they die.

People like getting what they think is free stuff from government.

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.

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.

No transaction happens unless it is voluntary. It only happens if both of you think you win.

Why, in our 'free' country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?

You can either invade a country or leave them alone and trade with them. When goods cross borders, armies don't.

Give me a break.

I never wanted to be an anchor for 25 years, and suddenly I wanted to be one.

I like taking the subway to work.

What I've learned in 40 years of consumer reporting is that the market is imperfect, and some people get ripped off.

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.

We have all kinds of government compensation systems that are much more efficient than the lawyers.

Take away the government's monopoly, and private groups will do it better.

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.

When workers can get and equal return for less effort, workers make less effort

We like to think we're superior to the people who, centuries ago, burned 'witches' for no better reason than a neighbor's belief that his crop failure or impotence was caused by that woman's action. But reporters are still prone to the same mental errors that caused these killings: seeing patterns where there are none, finding causes where there is only coincidence, ignoring our sources' political agendas and turning scanty evidence into panic.

David Boaz has been my guide to the history, economics, and politics of freedom for years.

Government is so big today that more than half the population gets a major part of its income from the state.

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?

People vastly overestimate the ability of central planners to improve on the independent action of diverse individuals. What I've learned watching regulators is that they almost always make things worse. If regulators did nothing, the self-correcting mechanisms of the market would mitigate most problems with more finesse. And less cost.

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.

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.

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.

Patrick Henry didn't say, "Give me safety, or give me death."

Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money?

..the real world's all we've got. Believers in the supernatural claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?

The political class can't imagine a decentralized world where good things happen...without them. But in the real world, that's exactly how good things happen, and how jobs are created. When government sets simple rules that everyone understands and then gets out of the way, free people create jobs.

Life is fairer when individuals are free to make their own decisions

There's no business that's too small for government to torture

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.

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.

What happened under communism - and increasingly, is happening in America, as Joseph Sobran put it: 'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.'

What would you think of a person who earned $24,000 a year but spent $35,000? Suppose on top of that, he was already $170,000 in debt. You'd tell him to get his act together - stop spending so much or he'd destroy his family, impoverish his kids and wreck their future. Of course, no individual could live so irresponsibly for long. But tack on eight more zeroes to that budget and you have the checkbook for our out-of-control, big-spending federal government.

Government has no wealth of its own. Before it gives anything to anyone, it must take from those who produced it.

A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system.

The welfare state has done to Black Americans what slavery (and Jim Crow and racism) could not have done. . .break up the black family. Today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in two-parent families. Historically, from the 1870s on. . . 75-90 percent of black kids lived in two-parent families.