Stephen Colbert on business

Winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

We claim no respectability. There’s no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don’t have to defend anything.

Who’s Britannica to tell me that the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say that it was built in 1941, that’s my right as an American.

The business of America is business.

Calvin Coolidge1872–1933Speech to the Society of American Newspaper Editors (1925).

• America

We demand that big business give the people a square deal; in return we must insist that when anyone engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall himself be given a square deal.

Theodore Roosevelt1858–1919Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913), Appendix A

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

Milton Friedman1912–2006Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 1 The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom, 2002 edition, page 15

• Economics
• Freedom