"Liberty is always unfinished business." ~ American Civil Liberties Union

“For those who unfairly lump Social Security in with Bernie Madoff, in all fairness, you should point out the difference. No one was ever legally required to pay money to Madoff.” ~ Addison Wiggin’s 5 Min. Forecast

"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." ~ Adlai Stevenson

"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." ~ Adlai Stevenson Jr.

"Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny." ~ Aeschylus

"Better to starve free than be a fat slave."
~ Aesop

"Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions." ~ Alan Barth

"Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities." ~ Alan Bloom

"Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior products of politically favored companies." ~ Alan Burris

"Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment." ~ Alan Watts

"Fire, water, and government know nothing of mercy." ~ Albanian proverb

"When politicians say 'I'm in politics,' it may or may not be possible to trust them, but when they say, 'I'm in public service,' you know you should flee." ~ Albert Jay Nock

"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." ~ Alexander Hamilton

"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"No age is unique in producing privileged persons who can happily dichotomize condemnation of their society and enjoyment of its fruits." ~ Alf Mapp Jr.

"For liberalism, the individual is the end, and society the means. For fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends." ~ Alfredo Rocco

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any." ~ Alice Walker
 

"Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior." ~ Allan Meltzer

"You cannot adopt politics as a profession and remain honest." ~ Ambrose Bierce

"Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigourously, more vigourously, and more severely, than by one." ~ Andrew Johnson

"The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism...." ~ Angelica Grimke

"Reason and virtue alone can bestow liberty." ~ Anthony Ashley Cooper
 

"True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man." ~ Antoine De Saintexupery

"What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose; the right to create for yourself the alternative of choice. Without the responsibility and exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing." ~ Archibald Macleish

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." ~ Arthur Miller

"Politics must be the battle of the principles... the principle of liberty against the principle of force." ~ Auberon Herbert

"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

"All governments are more or less combinations against the people...and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled...the power of government can only be kept within its constituted bounds by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected sentiment of the people." ~ Benjamin Franklin Bache

"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world." ~ Benjamin Harrison

"Democracy: The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it." ~ Benjamin Lichtenberg

"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 tree of liberty could not grow were it not watered with the blood of tyrants." ~ Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." ~ Bertrand de Jouvenel

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction." ~ Blaise Pascal

"Keynesianism is in part economic theory, but its real goal is the social-governmental manipulation of markets intended to concentrate government power in the hands of the corporate few, producing corporatist fascism as the final economic and financial power under such a system and the final implementation, which ends in the brute force and the manipulation of laws for its completion, which is totalitarian government." ~ Bob Chapman

"You can't trust politicians. It doesn't matter who makes a political speech. It's all lies - and it applies to any rock star who wants to make a political speech as well." ~ Bob Geldof

"When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition." ~ Brian Wesbury

"What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage." ~ Bruce Barton

"There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting." ~ Buddha

"'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'." ~ C.S. Lewis

"Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business." ~ Calvin Coolidge

"If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other." ~ Carl Schurz

"Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive." ~ Carolyn Lochhead

"There are two kinds of restrictions on human liberty -- the restraint of law and that of custom.  No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion." ~ Carrie Chapman Catt
 

"Liberty is one of the choicest gifts that heaven hath bestowed upon man, and exceeds in value all the treasures which the earth contains within its bosom, or the sea covers. Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable." ~ Cervantes

"I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to [me] what it concedes to the butterflies!" ~ Charles Dickens

"The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent." ~ Charles Eliot Norton

"It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.'" ~ Charles Evans Hughes

"Tyranny is always better organized than freedom." ~ Charles Peguy

"Going to war accelerated the move from indirect to direct rule. Almost any state that makes war finds that it cannot pay for the effort from its accumulated reserves and current revenues. Almost all war-making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat - including men - from reluctant citizens who have other uses for their resources." ~ Charles Tilley

"There is no crueler tyranny that that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." ~ Charles-Louis de Secondat

"Here's your enemy for this week, the government says. And some gullible Americans click their heels and salute - often without knowing who or even where the enemy of the week is." ~ Charley Reese

"Political correctness is simply tyranny with manners." ~ Charlton Heston

"There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it." ~ Christopher Darlington Morley

"In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test." ~ Christopher Hitchens

"There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way." ~ Christopher Morley

"In our desire to have government become our benefactor and sustainer, we have allowed it to become our taskmaster and overlord. As a result, we have become little more than well-fed, well-entertained slaves to the state. Freedom, as envisioned by our forefathers, is gone." ~ Chuck Baldwin

"When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty." ~ Confucius

"We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex--but Congress can." ~ Cullen Hightower

"A free man is as jealous of his responsibilities as he is of his liberties." ~ Cyril James

"The big thieves hang the little ones." ~ Czech proverb

"The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare." ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"The difference between libertarianism and socialism is that libertarians will tolerate the existence of a socialist community, but socialists can't tolerate a libertarian community." ~ David Boaz

"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children brought up easy, let it slip away again, and their grandchildren are once more slaves." ~ David Herbert Lawrence

"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." ~ David Hume

"Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest." ~ David Ogilvy

"I invest in anything that Bernanke can't destroy including Gold, canned beans, bottled water and flashlight batteries...." ~ David Stockman

"Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior." ~ Dee Hock

"No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others." ~ Denis Diderot

"A fool is very dangerous when in power." ~ Denis Fonvizin

"Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression." ~ Dick Feagler

"Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter, but are quickly forgotten." ~ Dick Gregory

"So easily do weak men put in high positions turn villains." ~ Dmitry Pisarev

"We now have so many regulations that everyone is guilty of some violation." ~ Donald Alexander

"Politicians, like bombers, seldom see their victims." ~ Donald Boudreaux

"We do many things at the federal level that would be considered dishonest and illegal if done in the private sector." ~ Donald Regan

"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries." ~ Doug Casey

"They make a rout about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty." ~ Dr. Samuel Johnson

"The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war." ~ E.B. White

"The essential psychological requirement of a free society is the willingness on the part of the individual to accept responsibility for his life." ~ Edith Packer

"The majority of us are for free speech when it deals with subjects concerning which we have no intense feelings." ~ Edmund Chaffee
 

"What more felicity can fall to creature, than to enjoy delight with liberty." ~ Edmund Spenser

"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 Coleson

"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians." ~ Edward Langley

"[When a victimless criminal] is treated as an enemy of society, he almost necessarily becomes one. Forced into criminal acts, immersed in underworld-related supply networks, and ever-conscious of the need to evade the police, his outlooks as well as behavior become more and more anti-social." ~ Edwin M. Schur

"The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with." ~ Eleanor Holmes Norton 

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." ~ Elie Wiesel

"Until we are all free, none of us are free." ~ Emma Lazarus

"The truth doesn't sell. It is high in supply, but low in demand." ~ Eric Schaub

"Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason." ~ Erich Fromm

"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty." ~ Eugene McCarthy

"Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish."
~ Euripides

"Tolerance is a better guarantee of freedom than brotherly love; for a man may love his brother so much that he feels himself thereby appointed his brother’s keeper." ~ Everett Dean Martin

"Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee." ~ F. Lee Bailey

"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

"It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy.  History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end." ~ Felix Frankfurter

"Liberty cannot be caged into a charter or handed on ready-made to the next generation. Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves." ~ Florence Allen

"The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not." ~ Freidrich von Hayek

"Arbitrary rule has its basis, not in the strength of the state or the chief, but in the moral weakness of the individual, who submits almost without resistance to the domineering power." ~ Friedrich Hatzel

"The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use." ~ Friedrich Hayek

"Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves." ~ Friedrich Neitzsche
 

"When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence." ~ Gary Lloyd

"Thou shall not steal, even by majority vote." ~ Gary North

“There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions-a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude.” ~ Geoffrey Fisher

"A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held." ~ Georg Cantor

"Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own." ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenber

"He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen." ~ George E. MacDonald

"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry." ~ George Eliot

"Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils." ~ George Stark

"The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time." ~ George Sutherland

"Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends." ~ George Will

"Taxation with representation ain't so hot either." ~ Gerald Barzan

"The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, “Are we free?” I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?" ~ Gerry Spence

"The thing that differentiates people from animals is money." ~ Gertrude Stein

"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought." ~ Graham Greene

"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to." ~ Granville Hicks

"Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched." ~ Guy de Maupassant

"Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have."

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. " ~ Harry Truman

"Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin." ~ Henry Cabot Lodge

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." ~ Henry Ford

"It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly." ~ Henry George

"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

"Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society." ~ Henry St. John

"The censor believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all, it is life with which he quarrels." ~ Heywood Broun

"Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty." ~ Hillaire Belloc

"No man survives when freedom fails
The best men rot in filthy jails
And those who cry 'appease, appease'
Are hanged by those they tried to please."
~ Hiram Mann

"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies." ~ Honore de Balzac

"While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery." ~ Horace Greeley

"When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare." ~ Howard Kershner

"Politics is the means by which the will of the few becomes the will of the many." ~ Howard Koch

"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible." ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

"Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." ~ I.F. Stone

"Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity." ~ Immanuel Kant

"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 Olds

"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants." ~ Isaac Newton

"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce." ~ J. Edgar Hoover

"If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all." ~ Jacob Hornberger

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be." ~ James Baldwin

"The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless." ~ James Dale Davidson

"The usual road to slavery is that first they take away your guns, then they take away your property, then last of all they tell you to shut up and say you are enjoying it." ~ James Donald

"The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority." ~ James Fenimore Cooper

True freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear
And, with heart and hand, to be
Earnest to make others free.
~ James Russell Lowell

 "Even the most Bush-happy, flag suckling jack-arse knows deep-down inside that something is wrong. America is over and everyone knows it. The New World Order has a dying empire odor and changing the channel ain't going to make this go away." ~ Jello Biafra

"Human nature also cherishes children, and wants the best for them. To endow ours with liberty is the greatest legacy we could provide." ~ Jim Davies

"Whoever controls the media, controls the mind." ~ Jim Morrison

"What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves." ~ Joel Miller

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." ~ John Cage
 

"Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state." ~ John Dewey

"Individuality is freedom lived." ~ John Dos Passos

"O freedom, first delight of human kind!" ~ John Dryden

"Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison." ~ John Hardwick

"Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own." ~ John Jay Chapman
 

"No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves." ~ John P. Zenger
 

"No nation, ancient or modern, ever lost the liberty of speaking freely, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves." ~ John Peter Zenger

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active.  The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime...." ~ John Philpot Curran
 

"The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy." ~ John Quincy Adams

"Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is blissfully ignorant." ~ John Simon

"So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:
- Obedient soldiers to the army;
- Obedient workers to the mines;
- Well subordinated civil servants to government;
- Well subordinated clerks to industry
- Citizens who thought alike about major issues."
~ John Taylor Gatto
 

"It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something." ~ John Wayne

"A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty Is worth a whole eternity in bondage." ~ Joseph Addison

"I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside." ~ Joseph Brodsky

"Liberty is the solution of all social and economic questions." ~ Joseph Labadie

"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand." ~ Josh Billings

"The cry of the soul is for freedom. It longs for liberty, from the date of its first conscious moments." ~ Josiah Gilbert Holland

“Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.” ~ Josiah Warren
 

"Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed." ~ Josiah William Gitt

"I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it." ~ Judge Learned Hand

"It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself." ~ Justice Casey Percell

"People fear witches, and burn women." ~ Justice Louis Brandeis

"The Declaration [of Independence], after all, catalogued the assaults on our freedoms committed by Britain's King George III. What has been built up over the last two and a quarter centuries is a structure that dwarfs George III's regime." ~ K.E. Grubbs, Jr.

"There is only one way to kill capitalism - by taxes, taxes, and more taxes." ~ Karl Marx

"Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers.  Liberty is a man-of-war, and we are all crew." ~ Kenneth W. Royce

"Armed people are free. No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist, no mob can take their liberty and property. And no 220-pound thug can threaten the well-being or dignity of a 110-pound woman who has two pounds of iron to even things out. People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and a social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work." ~ L. Neil Smith

"The upstanding, church-going, law-abiding, tax-paying citizen who votes Democratic or Republican is far more despicable, and a bigger threat to humanity, than the most promiscuous, lazy, drug-snorting hippie. Why? Because the hippie is willing to let others be free, and the voter is not." ~ Larken Rose

"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." ~ Laurens van der Post

"Whenever there is some trouble in any area of the economy, the simplest solution to many people is "Let the government fix it." Yet every time the government uses its money or its power to favor this group or that the net result is such a web of supports, subsidies, interventions and controls that it is almost impossible for a nation to find its way back into a dynamic system of really free enterprise." ~ Lawrence Fertig

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times." ~ Lawrence W. Reed

"What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it…" ~ Learned Hand

"Statism is but socialized dishonesty; it is feathering the nests of some with feathers coercively plucked from others - on the grand scale. There is no moral difference between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax or any other social program." ~ Leonard Read

"If you feel driven to feed the poor, get your checkbook out and keep your tyrannical mouth shut about it." ~ Lew Goldberg

"For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt." ~ Lillian Hellman

"At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities...." ~ Lord Acton

"To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused." ~ Lord George Lyttleton

"Political liberty is nothing else but the diffusion of power." ~ Lord Hailsham

"National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S.--and the cost accounting of the Pentagon." ~ Louis Sullivan

"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.  When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet." ~ Lyle Myhr

"I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS." ~ Malcolm Forbes

"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

"The use of 'religion' as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time." ~ Margaret Atwood

"Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate." ~ Mark B. Cohen

"Gun registration is a gateway drug." ~ Mark Gilmore

"The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society." ~ Mark Skousen

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism." ~ Mary McCarthy

"Americans have the mistaken viewpoint that Lady Liberty is only a peacetime luxury who is ill-equipped to fight the nasties. Therefore, they reason, we need an equally nasty Big Brother. Americans have forgotten that Lady Liberty is one ferocious mother when protecting her children." ~ Mary Ruwart

"There is a word sweeter than mother, home or heaven. That word is liberty." ~ Matilda Joslyn Gage

"The dignity of man is in free choice." ~ Max Frisch

"I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but I would prefer that to their being educated by the state." ~ Max Victor Belz

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." ~ Mayer Amschel Rothschild

"How bad do things have to get before you do something? Do they have to take away all your property? Do they have to license every activity that you want to engage in? Do they have to start throwing you on cattle cars before you say “now wait a minute, I don’t think this is a good idea.” How long is it going to be before you finally resist and say “No, I will not comply. Period!” Ask yourself now because sooner or later you are going to come to that line, and when they cross it, you’re going to say well now cross this line; ok now cross that line; ok now cross this line. Pretty soon you’re in a corner. Sooner or later you’ve got to stand your ground whether anybody else does or not. That is what liberty is all about." ~ Michael Badnarik

"Each and every time someone says 'there ought to be a law' they are saying that men with guns should enforce their will on innocent others." ~ Michael Barnett

"Government does not grow by seizing our freedoms, but by assuming our responsibilities." ~ Michael Cloud

"The angels and the devils are definitely within us, not within the machines we use." ~ Michael Dertouzos

"The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny." ~ Michael Parenti

"Liberty is one of the most precious gifts which heaven has bestowed on man; with it we cannot compare the treasures which the earth contains or the sea conceals; for liberty, as for honor, we can and ought to risk our lives; and, on for the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall man." ~ Miguel de Cervantes

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right." ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi

"It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do." ~ Moliere

"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men." ~ Mortimer Adler

"Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity." ~ Mother Teresa

"I like to think of myself as something of a curator for the Museum of the Decline of Civilization." ~ N.B. Driggers

"Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration of Independence]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see." ~ Naomi Wolf

"A people which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything." ~ Napoleon

"Because we believe that our ethnic group, our society, our political party, our God, is better than your God, we kill each other." ~ Neale Donald Walsch

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” ~ Nelson Mandela

"The legacy of Democrats and Republicans approaches: Libertarianism by bankruptcy." ~ Nick Nuessle

"It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it." ~ Oliver Cromwell

"Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy." ~ Orson Welles

"The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too."  ~ Oscar Levant

"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Petty laws breed great crimes." ~ Ouida

"Let Mr. Madison tell me when did liberty ever exist when the sword and the purse were given up from the people? Unless a miracle shall interpose, no nation ever did, nor ever can retain its liberty after the loss of the sword and the purse." ~ Patrick Henry

"The era of resisting big government is never over." ~ Paul Gigot

"Throughout history, the attachment of even the humblest people to their freedom…has come as an unpleasant shock to condescending ideologues." ~ Paul Johnson

"The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell's 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface.  Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars."

"Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what's right for you." ~ Paul Williams

"Conformity and obedience
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth
Makes slaves of men and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton."

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
 

"Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases?" ~ Persius

"There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else." ~ Peyton Conway March
 

"A personal note to the Founding Fathers: We're sorry. We blew it. You made it possible for us to live free and we blew it. We've given up nearly every personal liberty in the name of a false sense of security sold to the masses by the same type of maniacal government about which you warned us and against which you fought so bravely. We now have to ask permission to take a leak on an airline flight. We never deserved you." ~ Phil Murphy

"Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy." 

"No one is free who is not master of himself." ~ Pythagoras

"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun." ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide." ~ R.J. Rummel

"War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them." ~ Randolph Bourne

"Monetary policy today is guided by little more than government fiat -- by the calculations, often mistaken economic theories, and whims of central bankers or, even worse, politicians. Under such a regime, inflation of three or four percent annually has come to be viewed as a stellar monetary performance. However, under a more sound monetary system -- i.e., a gold standard -- such increases in the general price level would be seen as wildly inflationary." ~ Raymond J. Keating

"In a free society, standards of public morality can be measured only by whether physical coercion -- violence against persons or property -- occurs. There is no right not to be offended by words, actions or symbols." ~ Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it." ~ Richard Lamm

"Washington is not America. It has become an alien city-state that rules America, and much of the rest of the world, in the way that Rome ruled the Roman Empire." ~ Richard Maybury

"Don't take things that don't belong to you." ~ Richard Scarry's Please and Thank You Book

"Give a good man great powers and crooks grab his job." ~ Rick Gaber

“What's interesting then is that every national government has some incentive to devalue [its currency] – to protect their own domestic economy and employment. Gold has no similar constituency for devaluation.” ~ Rick Rule

"As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago." ~ Judge Robert Bork

"This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth." ~ Robert Earl Hayden

"All nonstate threats to life, liberty, and property appear to be relatively petty and therefore can be dealt with. Only states can pose truly massive threats, and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind invariably come to pass." ~ Robert Higgs

"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

"Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities." ~ Robert Nozick

"It is becoming increasingly apparent that many—arguably most—of the problems that plague our nation have been aggravated rather than alleviated by federal intervention. In one area after another, massive infusions of tax dollars have been squandered on false solutions which, when they fail to achieve their stated objectives, are cited to justify even more spending on other futile schemes that result in bigger government." ~ Robert W. Lee

"The real freedom of any individual can always be measured by the amount of responsibility which he must assume for his own welfare and security." ~ Robert Welch

"19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society." ~ Rocco Galati

"The pattern is as old as human life. The new rulers use more and more force, more police, more soldiers, trying to enforce more efficient control, trying to make the planned economy work by piling regulations on regulations, decree on decree. The people are hungry and hungrier. And how does a man on this earth get butter? Doesn't the government give butter? But government does not produce food from the earth; Government is guns. It is one common distinction of all civilized peoples, that they give their guns to the Government. Men in Government monopolize the necessary use of force; they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use." ~ Rose Wilder Lane

"The higher entry standards imposed by licensing laws reduce the supply of professional services. The poor are the net losers, because the availability of low-cost service has been reduced. In essence, the poor subsidize the information research costs of the rich." ~ S. David Young

"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." ~ Sally Kempton

"He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power." ~ Salvador De Madariaga

"Violence is the last resource of the incompetent." ~ Salvor Hardin
 

"It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue." ~ Sam Adams

"The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit." ~ Samuel Gompers

"...the most reprehensible fraud in this great jambalaya of frauds is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund....in the next century...the American people will wake up to the reality that those IOUs in the trust fund vault are a 21st-century version of Confederate bank notes." ~ Sen. Ernest Hollings

"Laws do not persuade just because they threaten." ~ Seneca

"Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ...as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities?" ~ Sergei Hoff

"Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
From none but self expect applause:
He noblest lives and noblest dies
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws." ~ Sir Richard Francis Burton
 

"Let him who would move the world, first move himself." ~ Socrates

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." ~ Soren Kierkegaard

"Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction." ~ St. George Tucker

"No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; its only use is to make them take bad money." ~ Stephen T. Byington

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

"Whenever you see people standing in a line, you know that either the government or Apple is involved (though for different reasons)." ~ The Editor

"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 highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not keep "protecting" you by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that." ~ Lysander Spooner

"Ever since its founding in 1913, the Fed has described itself as an 'independent' agency operated by selfless public servants striving to "fine-tune" the economy through monetary policy. In reality, however, a non-political governmental institution is as likely as a barking cat." ~ Thomas DiLorenzo

 
"I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill." ~ Thomas Edison

"Man had better be without education than be educated by their rulers." ~ Thomas Hodgskin

"Better to dwell in freedom's hall,
With a cold damp floor and mouldering wall,
Than bow the head and bend the knee
In the proudest palace of slaverie."
~ Thomas Moore

"The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself." ~ Thomas Szasz

"If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom." ~ Tom Braun

"Switzerland is a land where crime is virtually unknown, yet most Swiss males are required by law to keep in their homes what amounts to a portable, personal machine gun." ~ Tom Clancy

"A cult is a religion with no political power." ~ Tom Wolfe

"About all a Federal Reserve note can legally do is wipe out one debt and replace it with itself another debt, a note that promises nothing. If anything's been paid, the payment occurs only in the minds of the parties..."
~ Tupper Saucy

"The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge." ~ U.S. vs. Dougherty, 1972

"Honest Value Never Fails." ~ inscription on silver coin

"When there's a single thief, it's robbery.  When there are a thousand thieves, it's taxation."  ~Vanya Cohen

"If you kill one person you are a murderer. If you kill ten people you are a monster. If you kill ten thousand you are a national hero." ~ Vassilis Epaminondou

"Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one's belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one's right to believe, and obey, his own conscience." ~ Victor Frankl

"People aren’t angels woven of light, but neither are they beasts to be driven into stalls." ~ Vladimir Korolenko

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation." ~  Vladimir Lenin

"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

"Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license,” and they will define freedom out of existence." ~ Voltarine de Cleyre

"There are two good things in life -- freedom of thought and freedom of action." ~ W. Somerset Maugham

"One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves and seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized everything. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State and more avid for state hand-outs.  It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic and social system." ~ W. H. Chamberlin

"It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." ~ W.K. Clifford

"The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws." ~ Walt Whitman

"A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness." ~ Walter Bagehot

"The next revolution will be when those who work refuse to support those who don't." ~ Walter Hickel

"[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 

"Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery." ~ Wayne Dyer

"The danger isn't that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don't realize that he is already inside the castle walls." ~ Wayne LaPierre

"Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love." ~ Wendell Willkie

"For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!" ~ Wilhelm Reich

"Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others." ~ William Allen White

"We are living in a sick society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them." ~ William Comer

'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it.  ~ William Cowper

"We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it." ~ William Faulkner

"If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control." ~ William Graham Sumner

"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

"The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours." ~ William James

"Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril." ~ William Lloyd Garrison

"A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it." ~ William Penn

"The bureaucrat's first objective, of course, is preservation of his job--provided by the big-government system, at the taxpayers expense. Whether real world problems get solved or not is of secondary importance. It doesn't take much cynicism, in fact, to see that the bureaucrats have a vested interest in not having problems solved. If the problems did not exist (or had been invented), there would be no reason for the bureaucrat to have a job." ~ William Simon