Michael Novak Quotes

I think it's fairly easy to provide a moral defense of capitalism. It has been - over the last 200 years - the underlying basis for enormous increases in productivity and human welfare and rising living standards, particularly in the United States, and in the industrialized nations but in fact, in most parts of the world.

Understanding capitalism is in some ways simple. At its best, capitalism rewards creators, makers and providers: the people and firms that create valuable things for others, like imaginative technologies and good food, cars and drugs.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

Government can't create wealth, but it can create the conditions for private enterprise to flourish.

Capitalism historically has been a very dynamic force, and behind that force is technical progress, innovation, new ideas, new products, new technologies, and new methods of managing teams.

In essence, capitalist systems are a mechanism by which economies may generate growth in knowledge - with much uncertainty in the process, owing to the incompleteness of knowledge.

Private ownership of property is vital to both our freedom and our prosperity.

From computers to information technology to airplanes, it has been America's unique blend of republican government and free-market capitalism that has allowed us to surpass all other nations in history.

Markets can do many wonderful things, which is why I'm glad to live in a capitalist country.

Capitalism does a number of things very well: it helps create an entrepreneurial spirit; it gets people motivated to come up with new ideas, and that's a good thing.

I unabashedly, unashamedly, unequivocally support the explosion of entrepreneurs in the capitalist system.

The Chinese are no slouches when it comes to capitalism.

Capitalism is that form of private property economy in which innovations are carried out by means of borrowed money.

American business is not a monster, but an expression of God-given impulse to create, and the savior of our happiness.

Labor alone creates and pays the profits of capital.

You can invest as much as you want in infrastructure and education. But in the end people have to be allowed to make a profit from their work.

If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be that private ownership of the means of production is a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being.... Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art and literature.

So long as we maintain a substantial private sector, therefore socialists must logically applaud the accumulation of private profit.

I love capitalism. It rewards me for being brave - it awards me for being innovative and thinking out of the box.

The degree to which society creates wealth, I think, is largely determined by government and financial systems.

Free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity!

When I think about capitalism, I think about all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in America for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families. And I don't think we should confuse what we have to do every so often in America, which is save capitalism from itself.

Capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge.

Capitalism gave the world what it needed, a higher standard of living for a steadily increasing number of people.

Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.