Top 100 Walter E. Williams Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, ‘Delay, Denial and Dilution,’ written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care.”

— Walter E. Williams

52. “Reaching into someone else’s pocket to assist one’s fellow man hardly qualifies as charity.”

— Walter E. Williams

53. “Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It’s high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.”

— Walter E. Williams

54. “The crucial question for any policy is not what, are its intentions, but what are its effects?”

— Walter E. Williams

55. “Multiculturalists argue that different cultural values are morally equivalent. That’s nonsense.”

— Walter E. Williams

56. “Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good.”

— Walter E. Williams

57. “If our country is to survive and prosper, we must summon the courage to condemn and reject the liberal agenda, and we had better do it soon.”

— Walter E. Williams

58. “One of the wonderful things about free markets is that the path to greater wealth comes not from looting, plundering and enslaving one’s fellow man, as it has throughout most of human history, but by serving and pleasing him.”

— Walter E. Williams

59. “Legislators aren’t known for being rocket scientists.”

— Walter E. Williams

60. “Universities have failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent.”

— Walter E. Williams

61. “Politicians have always coveted the liberties we hold.”

— Walter E. Williams

62. “I have nothing against rich people. In fact, I’ve been struggling most of my life to join them.”

— Walter E. Williams

63. “The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs. The normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse mainly by their own government.”

— Walter E. Williams

64. “The Rev. Jesse Jackson once said, “There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery – then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

— Walter E. Williams

65. “If you hate my guts and have designs to hurt me, and I see you building a cannon aimed at my house, I am not going to wait for you to finish construction.”

— Walter E. Williams

66. “According to the Institute for International Economics, trade barriers cost American consumers $80 billion a year or more than $1,200 per family.”

— Walter E. Williams

67. “What our nation needs is a separation of “business and state” as it has a separation of “church and state.” That would mean crony capitalism and crony socialism could not survive.”

— Walter E. Williams

68. “The law-abiding black citizen who is passed up by a taxi, refused pizza delivery, or stopped by the police can rightfully feel a sense of injustice and resentment. But the bulk of those feelings should be directed at those who have made race synonymous with higher rates of criminal activity rather than the taxi driver or pizza deliverer who is trying to earn a living and avoid being a crime victim.”

— Walter E. Williams

69. “If there’s a distinct group of Americans who harbor open contempt for constitutional principles and rule of law, it’s lawyers, judges and members of Congress.”

— Walter E. Williams

70. “The public good is promoted best by people pursuing their own private interests. This bothers some people because they’re more concerned with motives than with results.”

— Walter E. Williams

71. “It was Thomas Jefferson who said that we should not allow the courts to have a monopoly on the interpretation of what is constitutional and what is not.”

— Walter E. Williams

72. “Whenever there’s a tragedy involving gun use, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the gun-control lobby and the news media seize it as another opportunity to exploit the emotions of uninformed American people for political gain.”

— Walter E. Williams

73. “Students who are alien and hostile to the education process ought to be removed. You say, “What will we do with them?” I say that’s a secondary issue. The first priority is to stop thugs from making education impossible for everyone else.”

— Walter E. Williams

74. “When it came to the 2000 election, 84 percent of Ivy League faculty voted for Al Gore, 6 percent for Ralph Nader and 9 percent for George Bush. In the general electorate, the vote was split at 48 percent for Gore and Bush, and 3 percent for Nader.”

— Walter E. Williams

75. “Philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explained that “no one is as hopelessly enslaved as the person who thinks he’s free.” That’s becoming an apt description for Americans who are oblivious to – or ignorant of – the liberties we’ve lost.”

— Walter E. Williams

76. “Most of what Congress does fits the description of forcing one American to serve the purposes of another American. That description differs only in degree, but not in kind, from slavery.”

— Walter E. Williams

77. “More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.”

— Walter E. Williams

78. “There are many farm handouts; but let’s call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, “Vote for me. I’ll use my office to take another American’s money and give it to you.””

— Walter E. Williams

79. “All we have to do now is to inform the public that the payment of social security taxes is voluntary and watch the mass exodus.”

— Walter E. Williams

80. “The 2000 election of George W. Bush as president gave Republicans what the Democrats have now, total control of the legislative and executive branches of government. When Bush came to office, federal spending was $1.788 trillion. When he left office, federal spending was $2.982 trillion.”

— Walter E. Williams

81. “Once Congress establishes that one person can live at the expense of another, it pays for everyone to try to do so.”

— Walter E. Williams

82. “After a Canadian has been referred to a specialist, the waiting list for gynecological surgery is four to 12 weeks, cataract removal 12 to 18 weeks, tonsillectomy three to 36 weeks and neurosurgery five to 30 weeks.”

— Walter E. Williams

83. “You men win your way into office and retain that office essentially by promising some Americans that you will give them the fruits of another man’s labor. You also win office by promising one group of Americans that they will be given a right or privilege that will be denied other Americans.”

— Walter E. Williams

84. “If we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important, or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists a freer hand to attack our property.”

— Walter E. Williams

85. “The founders of our nation feared paper currency because it gave government the means to steal from its citizens.”

— Walter E. Williams

86. “If the Constitution framers would come back today, they would have contempt for most of us.”

— Walter E. Williams

87. “No human should be coerced by the state to bear the medical expense, or any other expense, for his fellow man. In other words, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another is morally offensive.”

— Walter E. Williams

88. “The belief that society benefits from destruction is lunacy.”

— Walter E. Williams

89. “An increasing amount of climate research suggests a possibility of global cooling.”

— Walter E. Williams

90. “Most of our country’s serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism.”

— Walter E. Williams

91. “UCLA’s economics department ranked among the top dozen in the country. I was in over my head, and Professor Hirschleifer’s assessment turned out to correct.”

— Walter E. Williams

92. “Do-gooders fail to realize that most good is not done in the name of good but done in the name of self-interest.”

— Walter E. Williams

93. “It’s government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption.”

— Walter E. Williams

94. “How much of a barrier to self-improvement is discrimination? What kinds of tools are in the ready grasp of those subjected to it? Surely one doesn’t want to sit around waiting for the end to discrimination.”

— Walter E. Williams

95. “Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers.”

— Walter E. Williams

96. “The moral tragedy that has befallen Americans is our belief that it is okay for government to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another – that in my book is a working definition of slavery.”

— Walter E. Williams

97. “How stupid is it of us to ask those who brought us “affordable” housing to now turn their attention to bringing us “affordable” health care?”

— Walter E. Williams

98. “The real problem is that workers are not so much underpaid as they are under-skilled. And the real task is to help those people become skilled. Congress cannot do this simply by declaring that as of such-and-such a date, everybody’s productive output is now worth $7.25 per hour. This makes about as much sense, and does just about as much harm, as doctors “curing” patients simply by declaring that they are cured.”

— Walter E. Williams

99. “Our founders, in the words of Thomas Paine, recognized that, “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

— Walter E. Williams

100. “Believing that presidents have taxing and spending powers leaves Congress less politically accountable for our deepening economic quagmire. Of course, if you’re a congressman, not being held accountable is what you want.”

— Walter E. Williams