Alex Epstein Quotes

America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state that he is born a slave to the needs of others.

The natural environment is not particularly hospitable to human life … the key to having a good environment is improving it through work… . Energy is fundamentally an environmental improver and if we classify it that way it makes sense out of a lot of these controversies… . It’s our obligation and our right to make [our environment] as good for human beings as possible. With that view, it’s very easy for people to understand precisely the reason it’s good to alter it – because it doesn’t naturally come the way we need it to be.

One point I like to stress is that we should think of coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear, as clean energy.

I am proud to work with the fossil fuel industry. I think it has historically done a horrible job of educating the public and I think my ideas will help it make a better case for freedom.

To attribute rights to animals is to ignore the purpose and justification of rights – to protect the interests of man.

Our lives depend on recognizing that human cloning, like all forms of ‘playing God,’ is a moral, life-promoting endeavor.

[The Center for Industrial Progress’] model allows us to keep conflicts of interest to an absolute minimum as we do our research and writing. As for our relationship with the fossil fuel industry, it’s the same as everyone else – they pay for our ideas, we never accept money to voice theirs.

Social Security should be phased out and ended altogether. … Social Security in any form is morally irredeemable. We should be debating, not how to save Social Security, but how to end it – how to phase it out so as to best protect both the rights of those who have paid into it, and those who are forced to pay for it today. This will be a painful task. But it will make possible a world in which Americans enjoy far greater freedom to secure their own futures.

The Commerce Clause has already been inflated so much that we basically can’t do anything without the government’s permission.

Resources are not taken from nature, but created from nature.

The difference between a healthy environment and an unhealthy environment can be summed up in one word, and it’s not ‘CO2’ or ‘climate’ or ‘temperature.’ It’s ‘development.’ […] Whether you’re drinking clean drinking water, listening to a thunderstorm with pleasure instead of fear, or going to the Grand Canyon, you should be thanking Big Coal, Big Oil, and Big Gas.