Quotes By Ben Stein

The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.

The ordinary American - as far as I can tell - knows so much less than he did fifty years ago and has such poor work habits compared with fifty years ago that the average multiplicand of knowledge/capabilities is a much smaller number than it was in 1961.

I am scared of getting old. I am scared of being ill.

The America that we knew as the smartest place on the planet is gone with the wind.

I have to tell you I never in my life anticipated getting this old, this fast. It seems as if I were 25 just a few days ago.

Now, although my life is still pleasant, the days of easy money are over.

I thought that all of the sacrifices and blessings of the whole history of mankind have devolved upon me. Thank you, God.

I agree that there are some bad apples on Wall Street. I spent about ten years exposing corporate and financial fraud for 'Barron's' magazine and I found a lot to write about.

The successful people of this world take life as it comes. They just go out and deal with the world as it is.

I don't like the sound of all the lists he's making.

Wow, bad news. Mr. Obama now hates Israel because the Israelis want to build 1,600 apartments in their own capital city, Jerusalem. Russia hates Israel, too. So do the Europeans. So does Ban Ki-moon, a Korean who is secretary-general of the UN.

I am so in love with just lying in bed listening to Mozart.

The banks are not lending, at least from what I see. They were so wild and reckless back in the good times that they got burned terribly.

If we try to engineer outcomes, if we overturn tradition to make everyone the same, we ruin society. If we upset tradition to allow for an equal shot at the starting gate, everyone wins, except for the charlatans and would be dictators.

The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want.

I am so used to having a comfortable life. What will it be like when I am no longer able to just buy anything I want?

We are not supposed to be all equal. Let's just forget that. We are supposed to have equal rights under law. If we do that, we have done enough.

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

A corporation's responsibility is to the shareholders, not its retirees and employees. Companies are doing everything they can to get rid of pension plans and they will succeed.

It is so great to sleep in safe, glorious, beautiful America. I just cannot get over it.

My 'thing' is that I just lie in my immense bed and look out the window at the skyline over Virginia and the sky and the airplanes coming into Reagan. I really love doing that.

Sleep makes people calmer, more alert, less fearful - just plain happier, or so I see around me and in me. I am sure that if this great nation were to concentrate on getting more sleep, we would be a happier, more confident people, and that by itself would be a major achievement.

Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating. It means nothing.

Nothing happens by itself... it all will come your way, once you understand that you have to make it come your way, by your own exertions.

Americans are terrified because so many of them have been laid off in recent years and months and they fear that they may be next. Even if they have not been laid off or have not known anyone laid off, they definitely know someone who has lost his home.

It means zero to be against greed.

When I seemed to be irritable or sad, my father would quote the learned Dr. Knight, and then say, 'Just go to sleep.' Like all smart aleck kids, I thought the advice was silly. But as I've grown older, I've realized just how smart Knight was.

Jump into the middle of things, get your hands dirty, fall flat on your face, and then reach for the stars.

If we are just specks of dust hit by lightning, if we have no spark of God in us, why not just take whatever we can and devil take the hindmost? I mean, we are fools not to do that if there is no right or wrong.

It is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated... it is finished when it surrenders.