Ben Stein's Quotes

This is my life. I love it.

We in the media are just people with all of people's faults.

Yes, Americans can still get credit for cars and trucks and refrigerators, and those businesses are doing well. But just try to get a home loan now.

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.

Usually I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe in the Bilderbergers as a conspiracy or the Trilateralists. But I am certain that the Communists killed JFK. There is a super great book called 'Legend' by Edward Jay Epstein that makes it all perfectly clear.

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.

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.

I do all of the grocery shopping in my little family. I buy cheese, of many different kinds, sliced packaged meats and poultry, bagels, immense quantities of eggs, pre-made fried chicken. Milk. Bacon. It is insane how much dairy, deli and bakery stuff I buy.

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.

So, who in the media is without sin among us? I am in the media and I am a major league sinner. I don't know anyone except my wife who isn't a big time sinner.

The people who did the collateralized mortgage obligations, sold them to pension funds, then sold them short, then bought credit default swap insurance on them, are just amazing. They are a law unto themselves.

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.

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

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

Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child's tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It's not funny and it's not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience for the child. It isn't the least bit funny.

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.

I don't believe the most successful people are the ones who got the best grades, got into the best schools, or made the most money.

You must take the first step. The first steps will take some effort, maybe pain. But after that, everything that has to be done is real-life movement.

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.

Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over gain, and you will grow stronger until have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.

Personal relationships are the fertile soil from which all advancement, all success, all achievement in real life grows.

It's amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.

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.

It's really amazing that in the age of unbelief, as a smart man called it, there isn't even more fraud. After all, with no God, there's no one to ever call you to account, and no accounting at all if you can get away with it.

The human spirit needs to accomplish, to achieve, to triumph to be happy.

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.

If you want to fight the evil you see in finance and industry, get to work reading the corporate filings, see if there has been fraud, and where you find it, report it to the SEC or write about it or blog about it.

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.

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

You cannot win if you're not at the table. You have to be where the action is.

I am about to vote. I am about to do something that human beings are rarely allowed to do. I am doing something that did not exist until America.

When are American Jews going to realize that the Republican Party is far better for Israel than the Democrats?

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

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.

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

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.