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ISIL – Liberty Quote Library
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Liberty Quote Library


We hope you enjoy the following collection of famous quotes and find some of these gems useful for your personal edification – or for adding spice to your writing. They are not listed in any particular order. I've always enjoyed just browsing through them for inspiration.
     If you have any good quotes you would like to share with us, send them along to isil@isil.org

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus Aurelius

Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.
Ronald Reagan

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell

To preserve the independence of the people, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies, and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burden which the citizen can bear, may it never be seen here that ... government shall itself consume the residue of what it was instituted to guard. To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "the guaranty to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it."
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Samuel Kercheval (12 July 1816).

[I]f experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. His very existence, indeed, is a standing subversion of the public good in every rational sense. He is not one who serves the common weal; he is simply one who preys upon the commonwealth.
H.L. Mencken, "The Politician" Prejudices: A Selection (4th Series, 1924).

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
Ambrose Bierce

You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power.
J.R.R. Tolkien (author: "Lord of the Rings")

What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
Cicero

Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it political? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and thus clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken

A society will remain as free or as enslaved as the conscious dispositions of individuals determine it shall be. Just as the roots of oppression are found in passivity, the foundations of our liberty reside in highly energized and focused minds that insist upon their independence. There are no shortcuts, no structures or doctrines that can be erected, no hallowed documents to be revered, to save us the effort of continually challenging those who would presume to exercise authority over our lives.
Butler Shaffer

In 1941, H.L. Mencken, himself a newspaperman most of his life, wrote: "To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse – 10 times as ignorant, 10 times as unfair and tyrannical, 10 times as complaisant and pusillanimous, and 10 times as devious, hypocritical, disingenuous, deceitful, pharisaical, Pecksniffian, fraudulent, slippery, unscrupulous, perfidious, lewd and dishonest."

"... so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
Voltairine de Cleyre

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
     Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
     The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad.
James Madison (father of the US Constitution)

Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god – Society, The State, The Government, The Commune – must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.
Rose Wilder Lane {1886-1968 American Author and Journalist}

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.
F.A. Hayek

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
Ronald Reagan

I never consider a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
— Thomas Jefferson

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
H.L. Mencken

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!
Samuel Adams (1722-1803),
letter to John Pitts, January 21, 1776

Instead of seeking ways to allow the market . . . to do its job, most recommendations call for further interventions intended to clean up the unwanted effects of past interventions. [But] each subsequent intervention intended to fix an earlier one will add new distortions and generate new unintended consequences. The free market is not a panacea. It does not eliminate old age, and it won't guarantee you a date for Saturday night. Private enterprise is fully capable of awful screw-ups. But both theory and practice indicate that its screw-ups are less pervasive and more easily corrected than those of government enterprises, including regulatory ones.
Gene Callahan
(Gene Callahan, who writes frequently for Mises.org, is author of "Economics for Real People" forthcoming from the Mises Institute).

Mystical references to "society" and its programs to "help" may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
Thomas Sowell

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion – in the long run, these are the only people who count.
Robert Heinlein

"Government has lost its ability to ever blindside me again. I no longer read the news and believe the written pages. I no longer assume the guilt of those I see arrested. I have learned to open my eyes and see a story other than the one that the government and the media want me to see."
Sunni Liston
Forfeiture Endangers American Rights (FEAR)

Do not consider Collectivists as "sincere but deluded idealists". The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not "idealistic," no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
Ayn Rand

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Thomas Sowell

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Ayn Rand

One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
Thomas Sowell

Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
Ludwig von Mises

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
Ludwig von Mises

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!
Karl Hess for Sen. Barry Goldwater; attribution to Cicero

It is not the right of property which is protected but the right to property. Property, per se, has no rights but the individual has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to life, the right to his liberty and the right to his property. These three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life but deny him his liberty is to take from him all that makes life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty is still to leave him a slave.
Justice George Sutherland

"The story of the transformation of the fundamental principle of American government from liberty to democracy is compelling, partly because the powers embodied in America's twenty-first-century democratic government are those that eighteenth-century Americans revolted against to escape."
Randall G. Holcombe, 2002

It is my belief that whereas the twentieth century has been a century of war and untold suffering, the twenty-first century should be one of peace and dialogue. As the continued advances in information technology make our world a truly global village, I believe there will come a time when war and armed conflict will be considered an outdated and obsolete method of settling differences among nations and communities.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
P.J. O'Rourke

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.
Mark Twain

There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.
Thomas Sowell

Politicians, like diapers, have to be changed frequently – and for the very same reason.Anonymous

There is but one means available to improve the material conditions of mankind: to accelerate the growth of capital accumulated as against the growth in population. The greater the amount of capital invested per head of the worker, the more and better goods can be produced and consumed. This is what capitalism, the much abused profit system, has brought about and brings about daily anew. Yet, most present-day governments and political parties are eager to destroy this system.
Ludwig von Mises

The reason welfare is bad is not because it costs too much, nor because it "undermines the work ethic," but because it is intrinsically at odds with the way human beings come to live satisfying lives.
Charles Murray

A society that robs an individual of the product of his efforts, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment – a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man's nature is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.
Ayn Rand

Public Schools too often fail because they are shielded from the very force that improves performance and sparks innovation in nearly every other human enterprise – competition.
Robert Lutz/Clark Durant

He who regulates everything by laws, is more likely to arouse vices than reform them.
Spinoza

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
Thomas Sowell

If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working.
Thomas Sowell

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
Thomas Paine

The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, capable not only of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting 100 impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.
Adam Smith

Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.
Henry David Thoreau

Education – compulsory schooling, compulsory learning – is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can.
John Holt

The reign of Virtue shall begin when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. Or so 'twas said many reigns of Virtue ago.
George Will

The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-union-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.
Milton Friedman

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
Justice Louis Brandeis

The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all.
H.L. Mencken

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trust either of them.
P. J. O'Rourke

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Ronald Reagan

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
H.L. Mencken

The public school system: "Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority."
Walter Karp, Editor Harper's Magazine

The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.
Thomas Jefferson
{1743-1826 3rd US President & Founding Father}

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
James Madison in "The Federalist"

Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change ... [T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.
H.L. Mencken

"Democracy – A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic – negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard for consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy."
1928 U.S. Army Training Manual

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
H. L. Mencken

Arms are the only true badge of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave.
Andrew Fletcher 1698

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either rods or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass

Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 446

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies."
C. S. Lewis

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.
H.L. Mencken

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
Thomas Jefferson

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.

In perpetrating a revolution, there are two requirements: someone or something to revolt against and someone to actually show up and do the revolting. Dress is usually casual and both parties may be flexible about time and place, but if either faction fails to attend, the whole enterprise is likely to come off badly.
Woody Allen (A Brief Yet Helpful Guide To Civil Disobedience (Without feathers). (1972)

If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retributions.
Justice Louis Brandeis, dissenting, Olmstead et al. v. United States, 277 U.S. 485 (1928)

The advancement of freedom is not a matter of who wields political power over creative actions; rather, it depends upon the disassembling of such power.
Leonard E. Read

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
George Washington

Liberty is the only thing you can't have unless you give it to others.
William Allen White

Definition of Politics: "Poli" in latin meaning "many" and "tics" meaning "blood-sucking parasites."

The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprisings.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), Japanese shogun, Tensho 16, Seventh Month, 8th Day [August 29?, 1588], quoted in "Sources of Japanese Tradition," Ryusaku Tsunoda, ed. (Columbia University Press, 1958), p.329

"... it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds ..."
Samuel Adams

"It doesn't seem to me that people who are serious about freedom can indulge themselves too much longer in the fantasy that freedom can be advanced through politics without the risk of doing themselves substantial hurt. Politics are the dynamic of government, government is theft and slavery, and we can achieve freedom through political action like we can achieve celibacy through rape.
Victor Milan

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H.L. Mencken

To paraphrase Mario Savio, a leader in the '60s Free Speech movement at Berkeley, you come to a point where the operation of the machine becomes so odious that you have no alternative but to remove your hands from the mechanisms and levers and jam a wrench into its gears with all your might.
Anonymous

Liberty embraces freedom from duress; freedom from government interference; freedom of locomotion; liberty embraces the Right of self-defence against unlawful violence; right to acquire and enjoy property; Right to acquire useful knowledge; the Right to earn livelihood in any lawful calling; right to engage in a lawful business; Right to determine the price of one's labor; The Right to freely buy and sell as others may; right to live and work where one will. Right to marry and have a family.
Blacks Law Dictionary, 5th Edition

What light is to the eyes – what air is to the lungs – what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.
Robert Green Ingersoll

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.
Winston Churchill

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
Thomas Jefferson

Where liberty is, there is my country.
Benjamin Franklin

Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
Will Rogers

I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.
Woodrow Wilson

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
Thomas Jefferson

Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.
Earl Warren

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
Henry Brooks Adams

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.
Thomas Jefferson

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Benjamin Franklin

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
H. L. Mencken

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed persons can change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

The care of every man's soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills.
Thomas Jefferson (October 1776)

Profits generated by a free (or even semifree) enterprise system are the means by which the various producing segments of a complex society, employing a division of skills, can gauge their success in meeting the requirements of society. Profits mean that a company is successful in meeting consumer demand for its products; decreasing profits mean that the company's energy is misdirected and should be reoriented toward more urgent requirements.
Kurt V. Leininger

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
H.L. Mencken

The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production. Total real wealth and income is made smaller than it would otherwise be. On net balance there is more poverty rather than less.
Henry Hazlitt

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
Thomas Jefferson

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.
Frédéric Bastiat

Another source of power in government is a military force. But this, to be efficient, must be superior to any force that exists among the people, or which they can command; for otherwise this force would be annihilated, on the first exercise of acts of oppression. Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealous will instantly inspire the inclination to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive ....
Noah Webster

Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.
Milton Friedman

Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
Milton Friedman

There was a time when we [the U.S.] had completely unrestricted immigration, when anybody could come to these shores and the motto on the Statue of Liberty had some real meaning. This was a country of hope and of promise for immigrants and their children, and as many as a million immigrants a year came in 1906 and '07 and '08. By 1914, roughly a third of the population was foreign-born or the immediate descendants of foreign-born ... The fact that year after year hundreds of thousands of people left the countries of Europe to come to this country was persuasive evidence that they were coming to improve their lot, not to worsen it.
Milton Friedman

Why have we had such a decline in moral climate? I submit to you that a major factor has been a change in the philosophy which has been dominant, a change from belief in individual responsibility to belief in social responsibility. If you adopt the view that a man is not responsible for his own behavior, that somehow or other society is responsible, why should he seek to make his behavior good?
Milton Friedman

The elementary truth is that the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement [of money]. It was not produced by the failure of private enterprise.
Milton Friedman

The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
Milton Friedman

Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.
Milton Friedman

The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product – and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.
Milton Friedman

The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise.
Milton Friedman

Adam Smith's key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit.
Milton Friedman

The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time. We never realize how well it functions until it is prevented from functioning.
Milton Friedman

The American people are becoming more and more afraid of, and are running away from, their own revolution.
Leonard E. Read

To believe in your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
Frédéric Bastiat

See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Frédéric Bastiat

The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.
Adam Smith

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.
Charles F. Kettering

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.
Thomas Jefferson

I cannot believe that the purpose of life is (merely) to be "happy." I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter: to have it make some difference that you have lived at all.
Leo Rosten

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack London

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
John Stuart Mill

I shall exert every faculty I possess in aiding to prevent the Constitution from being nullified, destroyed, or impaired; and even though I should see it fail, I will still, with a voice feeble, perhaps, but earnest as ever issued from human lips, and with extinguish, call on the people to come to its rescue.
Daniel Webster

Almost everybody, including most politicians, still give lip service to "free enterprise," but the plain fact is that American business is seriously hobbled by an ever-expanding network of restrictions, regulations, and interferences, especially at the Federal level, and the mechanism of the market, indispensable to a free economy, is limping badly and no longer giving effective guidance in the utilization of resources.
W.A. Paton

Responsibility, unlike instinctive pursuit of pleasure, proceeds from inner conflict, fought on a battleground stretching from man's brain to his soul. From this individual struggle emerges a sense of values expressed through physical activity.
Dean Banks

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks ... It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.
Samuel Adams

The greatest security a person can have comes from within himself, not from the outside. Nothing anyone can do for you can begin to match what you can do for yourself.
Samuel Goldwyn

Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader.
Aristotle

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
James Madison

The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging commodities and services, fight one another.
Ludwig von Mises

When violence is covert, legal, and approved by a majority, it is more deadly by reason of its disguises. It works stealthily to increase friction in society and to erode and corrupt social bonds. The shadow lengthens, political intervention and control increases, men rely more and more on violence to gain their ends. We careen, unwittingly, toward the servile state. This eventually is not being forced upon us; we are doing it to ourselves, largely in ignorance of what it is we are really doing.
Edmund A. Opitz

The market economy – capitalism – is based on private ownership of the material means of production and private entrepreneurship. The consumers by their buying or abstention from buying ultimately determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. They render profitable the affairs of those businessmen who best comply with their wishes and unprofitable the affairs of those who do not produce what they are asking for most urgently ...
Ludwig von Mises

Free men, defined as those who understand these distinctions, are the only ones who can rescue the indifferent and the docile from a growing serfdom. The burden is on them and them alone.
Leonard E. Read

The fact throughout history is that whenever government dominates the economic affairs of its citizenry, a free society is eroded, then destroyed, and a minority government ensues. Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.
William E. Simon

Freedom is not a luxury for a few wealthy nations; as many of our liberal pundits try to tell us, but a necessity for the poor and hungry.
Edward P. Coleson

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
Frédéric Bastiat

Do you not see, first, that – as a mental abstract – physical force is directly opposed to morality; and secondly, that it practically drives out of existence the moral forces? How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being? If you tie a man's hands there is nothing moral about his not committing murder. Such an abstaining from murder is a mechanical act; and just the same in kind, though less in degree, are all the acts which men are compelled to do under penalties imposed upon them by their fellow men. Those who would drive their fellow men into the performance of any good actions do not see that the very elements of morality – the free act following on the free choice – are as much absent in those upon whom they practice their legislation as a flock of sheep penned in by hurdles.
Auberon Herbert

Once an individual who would advance liberty has settled on self-perfection as correct method, the first fact to bear in mind is that ours in not a numbers problem. Were it necessary to bring a majority into a comprehension of the libertarian philosophy, the cause of liberty would be utterly hopeless. Every significant movement in history has been led by one or just a few individuals with a small minority of energetic supporters.
Leonard E. Read

Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it, a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. It is only an ethical movement which can rescue us from the slough of barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals.
Albert Schweitzer

The end of the law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.
John Locke

Trade between two individuals, entered into freely, always results in benefits to both parties. Otherwise, why should they trade?
W.M. Curtis

Political freedom and the whole gamut of civil rights were impossible until there existed the freedom of property which emerged as the burdens of feudal tenure were cast off.
Bertel M. Sparks

The truth is that private ownership of property is the greatest instrument of freedom ever designed and it is sheer folly to speak of granting a man freedom while withholding that instrument from him.
Bertel M. Sparks

When Benjamin Franklin first went to Paris as envoy from the newly formed Confederacy of American States, crowds lined the street to see him ride to and from his lodgings. This was not because he represented an upstart little nation fighting for its independence. Instead, it was because he was already world famous as a scholar, scientist, and philosopher. Of formal schooling he had almost none, but even by today's standards, he was a highly educated man. V. Orval Watts

Man must have the right of choice, even to choose wrong, if he shall ever learn to choose right.
Josiah C. Wedgwood

Central planning will eventually destroy individual liberty by concentrating all political power in one person or in a committee; furthermore, it will eventually end our prosperity by laying the dead hand of state control on the economy.
Robert M. Thornton

The greatest threat to the future of our nation - to our freedom - is not foreign military aggression ... but the growing dependence of the people on a paternalistic government. A nation is no stronger than its people and the best measure of their strength is how they accept responsibility. There will never be a great society unless the materialism of the welfare state is replaced by individual initiative and responsibility.
Charles B. Shuman

The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand; and the mind that desires such things - that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty, will as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.
Gilbert Murray

Black leaders and white liberals have kept black Americans so focused on superficial indications of racism, that we overlook the most pernicious and ruinous use of race, that is, as an economic weapon – not just to deter one's employment in companies created by others, but to hamper the ability to create employment for oneself.
Elizabeth Wright

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. If all it be nominally that of "society" as a whole of that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us.
Friedrich A. Hayek

War cannot be driven out by war, for the use of evil breeds more evil, hostility more hostility, and the use of force more force.
Hans F. Sennholz

Peace is the natural state of man, war the temporary repeal of reason and virtue.
Hans F. Sennholz

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
Anonymous

Lots of people have stomach trouble - no guts.

War is the health of the State.
Randolph Bourne

The king has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent Swarms of Officers to harass our People and eat out their substance.
U.S. Declaration of Independence

The officers of Congress, may come upon you now, fortified with all the terrors of paramount federal authority. Excisemen [taxmen] may come in multitudes; for the limitation of their numbers no man knows. They may, unless the general government be restrained ... go into your cellars and rooms, and search, ransack, and measure, everything you eat, drink, and wear.
Patrick Henry

A day an hour of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity of bondage.
Cato

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Goethe

Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it; and they will exercise it most undoubtedly, in popular governments, under pretense of public safety.
Daniel Webster

The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief.
Aristotle

I am for relying, for internal defense, on our militia solely, till actual invasion, and for such naval force only as may protect our coasts and harbors from such depredations as we have experienced; and not for a standing army in time of peace, which may overawe the public sentiment; not for a navy, which, by its own expenses and the eternal wars in which it will implicate us, will grind us with public burdens, and sink us under them. I am for free commerce with all nations; political connection with none; and little or no diplomatic establishment.
Thomas Jefferson

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through his sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back again into bondage.
Professor Alexander Tytler Penned over 200 years ago while the US was still a British Colony. (describing the fall of the Athenian Republic 2000 years prior).

A people may prefer a free government, but if by momentary discouragement or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or trust him with powers to subvert their institutions, in all these cases they are unfit for liberty.
John Stuart Mill

America's adventure in free government [is threatened by a] military industrial complex. . . We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

A people may be deceived, they may be betrayed by men in whom they put their confidence. But they deserve to be abandoned by providence if they trust their interest with men whom they know to be either weak or wicked.
Andrew Elliot

Despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy.
G.K. Chesterton

Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation.
James Madison

No free people ever existed, or can ever exist, without keeping "the purse strings" in their own hands. Where this is the case, they have a constitutional check upon the administration, which may thereby by brought into order without violence. But when such a power is not lodged in the people, oppression proceeds uncontrolled in its career, till the governed, transported into rage, seek redress in the midst of blood and confusion.
John Dickinson

Does there exist a nobler inspiration than the desire to be free? It is by his freedom that a man knows himself, by his sovereignty over his own life. To violate freedom, to flout that sovereignty, is to deny man the right to live his life, to take responsibility for himself with dignity.
Elie Wiesel

Few of us seem to want to keep government out of our personal affairs and responsibilities. Many of us seem to favor various types of government guaranteed and compulsory "security." We say that we want personal freedom, but we demand government housing, government price controls, government-guaranteed jobs and wages. We boast that we are responsible persons, but we vote for candidates who promise us special privileges, government pensions, government subsidies, and government electricity.
Dean Russell

The beneficial effect of state intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak, visible, while its evil effects are gradual and indirect and lay out of sight ... Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favor upon governmental intervention.
A. V. Dicey

The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone.
Justice Louis Brandeis

No one wins when freedom fails
The best men rot in filthy jails
And those who cried appease, appease,
Are hanged by those they tried to please.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
Barry Goldwater

It must be obvious that liberty necessarily means freedom to choose foolishly as well as wisely; freedom to choose evil as well as good; freedom to enjoy the rewards of good judgment, and freedom to suffer the penalties of bad judgment. If this is not true, the word "freedom" has no meaning.
Ben Moreell

There is nothing new in state interventionism. It is as old and reactionary as societal organization itself. Always, when it permeates the body politic, it kills the nation.
Spruille Braden

Throughout forty centuries of human experience, price controls at their best have always been a miserable failure. At their worst, they have led to famine and bloodshed - to defeat and to disaster.
Irving S. Olds

Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare, receiving more generous payments, does not seem to have made this country a nice place to live - not even for the poor on welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences.
Irving Kristol

The question remains, how and why that group of people known as intellectuals has for the most of this century become alienated from our society and so often attracted to socialist societies that are objectively reprehensible, that deny individuals even the most basic civil liberties and fail to deliver material well-being.
Edward Crane

The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and this way enables the one to offset the other.
Milton Friedman

Give me liberty to know, to think, to believe, and utter freely, according to conscience, above all other liberties.
John Milton

Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.
Ludwig von Mises

Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must rise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.
Caleb C. Colton

The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.
Ayn Rand

Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world and she has nothing to do but trade with them.
Thomas Paine - 1776

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail.
Anonymous

Given man's nature, freedom will always be in jeopardy, and the only question that need concern each of us is if and how well we took our stand in its defense during the short period of time when we were potentially a part of the struggle.
Benjamin Rogge

The whole recorded history of man is strewn with the wreckage of the great civilizations which have crumbled under price controls; and in forty centuries of human experience, there has never been – so far as I can discover - a single case where such controls have stopped, or even curbed for long, the forces of inflation. On the contrary, in every instance I can find, they have discouraged production, created shortages, and aggravated the very evils they were intended to cure.
Irving S. Olds

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
Tolstoy

You can not fly any higher after an election than you did during your campaign.
Leonard Reed

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
Cartoon character Calvin to his toy tiger, Hobbes

It seems that wherever the Welfare State is involved, the moral precept, "Thou shalt not steal," becomes altered to say: "Thou shalt not steal, except for what thou deemest to be a worthy cause, where thou thinkest that thou canst use the loot for a better purpose than wouldst the victim of the theft."
F. A. Harper

We must remember that the principal instrument of government is coercion and that our government officials are no more moral, omnipotent, nor omniscient than are any of the rest of us. Once we understand the basic principles which must be observed if freedom is to be safeguarded against government, we may become more hesitant in turning our personal problems and responsibilities over to that agency of coercion, with its insatiable appetite for power.
W. C. Mullendore

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few ... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
James Madison

Property is the fruit of labor. Property is desirable, is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently to build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence.
Abraham Lincoln

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
Hilaire Belloc

The U.S. Department of Defense is the third largest planned economy in the world – led only by the (former) Soviet Union and China.
William Niskanan, Cato Institute

It is a psychological paradox that those who are most afraid to die are most afraid to live; and in seeking to cheat death, they defraud themselves of life.
Sydney J. Harris

The essential quality of a free economy is that it cannot be planned. It leaves the solution of problems to the inspiration of the individuals in the untrammeled population. When something approaching a free economy has existed, it has always worked better than the schemes of any planners.
Thomas H. Barber

The will of men is not shattered (by the welfare state), but softened, bent, and guided. Men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence. It does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, until each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville

But how is ... legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals.
Frédéric Bastiat

The person who used political power to force others to conform to his ideas seems inevitably to become corrupted by the power he holds. In due course he comes to believe that power and wisdom are the same thing and, since he has power, he must also have wisdom. At this point he begins to lose his ability to distinguish between what is morally right and what is politically expedient.
Ben Moreell

Government meddling with money has not only brought untold tyranny into the world; it has also brought chaos and not order. It has fragmented the peaceful, productive world market and shattered it into a thousand pieces, with trade and investment hobbled and hampered by myriad restrictions, controls, artificial rates, currency breakdowns, etc. ... Coercion, in money as in other matters, brings, not order, but conflict and chaos.
Murray N. Rothbard

A new public opinion must be created privately and unobtrusively. The existing one is maintained by the press, by propaganda, by organization, and by financial and other influences which are at its disposal. The unnatural way of spreading ideas must be opposed by the natural one, which goes from man to man and relies solely on the truth of the thoughts and the hearer's receptiveness for new truth.
Albert Schweitzer

As one advances in life, one realizes more and more that the majority of men - and of women - are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalized, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training.
José Ortega y Gasset

Rather than performing the traditional role of upholding private property, the law has become a respectable instrument of larceny in the hands of the people and has taken the lead in abrogating the property rights it once so nobly upheld. Larcenous crimes for ill-gotten gain, once practiced darkly in secret, have assumed the honorable guise of social justice and boldly moved to the halls of government ... The formerly venerated halls of government ... have become a disgraceful affront to every concept of human decency.
Robert K. Newell

The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society. Historians know that both phenomena were especially marked in the declining eras of the Roman Empire in the West and of its successor state, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire.
William Henry Chamberlin

Once Confucius was walking on the mountains and he came across a woman weeping by a grave. He asked the woman what here sorrow was, and she replied, "We are a family of hunters. My father was eaten by a tiger. My husband was bitten by a tiger and died. And now my only son!" "Why don't you move down and live in the valley? Why do you continue to live up here?" asked Confucius. And the woman replied, "But sir, there are no tax collectors here!" Confucius added to his disciples, "You see, a bad government is more to be feared than tigers."
Lin Yutang

Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance.
Henry Hazlit

Do not consider Collectivists as "sincere but deluded idealists". The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not "idealistic," no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
Ayn Rand

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer {1820-1903 British Philosopher}

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The glory of the human race is the uniqueness of each individual, the fact that every person, though similar in many ways to others, possesses a completely individualated personality of his own. It is the fact of each person's uniqueness ... that makes us care whether he lives or dies, whether he is happy or oppressed...It is the fact that these unique personalities need freedom for their full development that constitutes one of the major arguments for a free society.
Murray N. Rothbard

Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?"
Thomas Paine

Painful as it may be to hear it, there's nothing special about the people of this country that sets them apart from the other people of the world. It is the Bill of Rights, and only the Bill of Rights, that keeps us from becoming the world's biggest banana republic. The moment we forget that, the American Dream is over.
Alexander Hope, "Looking Forward"

With American school children repeatedly coming in at or near the bottom in international tests, why do elected officials act as if what the schools need is more money and more time – especially after ever-increasing amounts of money have already been poured down a bottomless pit over the years, with no visible educational results, and with so much time currently being squandered on "projects" and "activities" rather than education?
Thomas Sowell

When the federal government is held to its proper constitutionally limited functions, tax reform will take care of itself.
Rep. Ron Paul


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