"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens." ~ Adam Smith

"There is no art which government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people." ~ Adam Smith

"By pursuing his own interest [every individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good." ~ Adam Smith

"In a militia, the character of the laborer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier: in a standing army, that of the
soldier predominates over every other character...." ~ Adam Smith

"It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will." ~ Adam Smith

"While I see many hoof marks going in, I see none coming out.  It is easier to get into the enemy's toils than out again." ~ Aesop

"Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear." ~ Alan Corenk

"Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no!  It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting." ~ Albert Camus

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience." ~ Albert Camus

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better." ~ Albert Camus

"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." ~ Albert Camus

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience." ~ Albert Camus

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

"It's no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of duty." ~ Albert Einstein

"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb.  This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses." ~ Albert Einstein

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!" ~ Albert Einstein

"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." ~ Albert Einstein

"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you." ~ Albert Jay Nock

"The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing." ~ Albert Jay Nock

"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you." ~ Albert Jay Nock

"It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. ... it does not appear to have occurred to the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance." ~ Albert Jay Nock

"Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty." ~ Aldous Huxley

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." ~ Aldous Huxley

"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power." ~ Aldous Huxley

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." ~ Aldous Huxley

"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." ~ Aldous Huxley

"Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.  One word of truth outweighs the world." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
 

"Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"It [government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.  The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, 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, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till 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

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community.  It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.  The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men 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, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles." ~ Ambrose Bierce

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

"What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others." ~ Aristotle

"We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do." ~ Auberon Herbert

"Socialism is but Catholicism addressing itself not to the soul but to the sense of men...[Both implore you to] accept authority, accept the force which it employs, resign yourself to all-powerful managers, give up the free choice and the free act...They both seek to sacrifice man." ~ Auberon Herbert

"And what sort of philosophical doctrine is this -- that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others. ... How, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed. ... It is not possible to suppose, without absurdity, that a man should have no rights over his own body and mind, and yet have a 1/10,000,000th share in unlimited rights over all other bodies and minds?" ~ Auberon Herbert

"How should it happen that the individual should be without rights, but the combination of individuals should possess unlimited rights?" ~ Auberon Herbert

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

"Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production." ~ Ayn Rand

"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

"Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demand for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen." ~ Ayn Rand

"It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible." ~ Ayn Rand

"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master." ~ Ayn Rand

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded." ~ Ayn Rand

"Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply
required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people’s savings on a scale
comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments." ~ Ayn Rand

"[S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power -- to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production." ~ Ayn Rand

"The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time." ~ Ayn Rand

"Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the “rights” of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights." ~ Ayn Rand

"Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law." ~ Ayn Rand

"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests.  The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism." ~ Ayn Rand

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper which should have been gold, are a token of honor -- your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money." ~ Ayn Rand

"The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal." ~ Ayn Rand

"There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns." ~ Ayn Rand

"Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny." ~ Barry Goldwater

"Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery." ~ Benjamin Disraeli

"If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valueable, and your freedom less complete." ~ Benjamin Disraeli

“Where liberty is, there is my country.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

"In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own.  Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"There never was a good war or a bad peace." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, was probably the prime cause of the revolution." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"No nation was ever ruined by trade." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"Make yourself sheep and the wolves will eat you." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"[A]s all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever...." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants forever." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"...as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"...as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever...." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the
Public; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence [printers] cheerfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State." ~ Bertrand de Jouvenel

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." ~ Bertrand Russell

"Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires." ~ Bertrand Russell

“Printing up extra money – with no backing – used to be the sort of thing only counterfeiters did. Now it is done by the central bankers and Treasury Secretaries themselves. They don’t apologize for it. They don’t hang their heads and contemplate blowing their brains out. Instead, they’re proud of it... announcing that they ‘saved civilization,’ or some such claptrap.” ~ Bill Bonner

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

"Terrorists can only take my life. Only my government can take my freedom." ~ Bruce Schneier

"Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us." ~ Butler Shaffer

"It is collectivism that is the unrealistic expression of utopian belief systems.  In its worst form -- the state -- collectivism is the institutionalized exertion of violence to compel living beings to behave contrary to their natural self-interest inclinations.  So strong are the motivations for individual preferences that the state must resort to attacks upon the very nature of life to satisfy the ambitions of those who see others as nothing more than resources to be exploited for such ends." ~ Butler Shaffer

"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance." ~ C.S. Lewis

"I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty." ~ Calvin Coolidge

"No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil." ~ Calvin Coolidge

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)" ~ Carl Sagan

"From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own." ~ Carl Schurz

"By Liberty I understand the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruits of his Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The Fruits of a Man's honest Industry are the just Rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal Equity, as is his Title to use them in the Manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above Limitations, every Man is sole Lord and Arbitrer of his own private Actions and Property." ~ Cato

"Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty." ~ Charles Caleb Colton

"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

"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free." ~ Charles Evans Hughes

"A reasonable action on the part of the majority is very rare, while the evidence of mob stupidity and brutality is overwhelming. The majority in power make laws for their own financial benefit, disregarding the interests of the minority, and when the weak minority, by adding to its numbers, becomes powerful, it, in turn, does the same thing; thus, by appealing to power to settle their conflicting interests, the conflict would go on forever." ~ Charles Sprading

"To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice." ~ Confucius

"I do esteem individual liberty above everything." ~ D.H. Lawrence

"The contest, for ages, has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power." ~ Daniel Webster

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." ~ Daniel Webster
 

"Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money." ~ Daniel Webster

"Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money." ~ Daniel Webster

"Mankind is at its best when it is most free." ~ Dante Alighieri

"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." ~ David Brin

"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few." ~ David Hume

"It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear." ~ Dick Cavett

"The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government’s assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors’ needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior." ~ Doug Bandow

"The inescapable price of liberty is an ability to preserve it from destruction." ~ Douglas MacArthur

"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." ~ Dresden James

"We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." ~ Edmund Burke
 

"The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse." ~ Edmund Burke
 

"Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, can never willingly abandon it." ~ Edmund Burke

"All men have equal rights, but not to equal things." ~ Edmund Burke

"It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do." ~ Edmund Burke

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." ~ Edmund Burke

"The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse." ~ Edmund Burke

"Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward." ~ Edward Abbey

"Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law." ~ Edward Abbey

"The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy... If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government—and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws." ~ Edward Abbey

"[On ancient Athens]: In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again." ~ Edward Gibbon

"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home." ~ Edward R. Murrow

"Truth, in its struggles for recognition, passes through four distinct stages. First, we say it is damnable, dangerous, disorderly, and will surely disrupt society. Second, we declare it is heretical, infidelic and contrary to the Bible. Third, we say it is really a matter of no importance either one way or the other. Fourth, we aver that we have always upheld it and believed it." ~ Elbert Hubbard

"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

"Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship." ~ Emma Goldman

"The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society" or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals." ~ Emma Goldman

"There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another...All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim." ~ Emma Goldman

"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish?  Nothing else." ~ Epictetus
 

"He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid." ~ Epictetus

"Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power." ~ Eric Hoffer

"There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail." ~ Eric Hoffer

"A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will." ~ Eric Hoffer

"The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do." ~ Eric Hoffer

"The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do." ~ Eric Hoffer

"To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.  They are eager to barter their independence
for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure.  They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility." ~ Eric Hoffer

"Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes.  The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity." ~ Eric Hoffer

"Standing up to a tyrant has always been illegal and dangerous.  There is no guarantee but one -- to not live like a slave, nor to die like one." ~ Eric Schaub

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him." ~ Ezra Pound

"Freedom is like taking a bath -- you have to keep doing it every day!" ~ Florynce Kennedy

"Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man - in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so." ~ Frank Chodorov

"Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids." ~ Frank Chodorov

"Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase...the human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive." ~ Frank Herbert

"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't 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 that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"It is indeed a singular thing that people wish to pass laws to nullify the disagreeable consequences that the law of responsibility entails. Will they never realize that they do not eliminate these consequences but merely pass them along to other people? The result is one injustice the more and one moral the less." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"What, then, is the law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. ... since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individual groups. ... But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim -- when he defends himself -- as a criminal." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. 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 ... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism -- including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self- defense; of punishing injustice?" ~ Frederic Bastiat

"There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate.  This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are 'just' because the law makes them so." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.  That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.  It is the right which they first of all strike down." ~ Frederick Douglass

"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. 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 many waters."  ~ Frederick Douglass

"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." ~ Frederick Douglass

"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave." ~ Frederick Douglass

"No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck." ~ Frederick Douglass

"To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

"By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up
the most complete despotism imaginable." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

"When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

"The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals.  In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

 "Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: `I, the state, am the people.'... Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest." ~ Friedrich von Hayek

"What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free." ~ Friedrich von Hayek

"The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest 'functionaire' possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work." ~ Friedrich von Hayek

"If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie: A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby." ~ George Herbert

"No man has ever ruled other men for their own good." ~ George Herron

"All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety." ~ George Mason

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

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." ~ George Orwell

"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." ~ George Orwell

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." ~ George Orwell

"The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." ~ George Orwell

"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question.
It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is "not done"... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals." ~ George Orwell

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master." ~ George Washington

"Should, hereafter, those incited by the lust of power and prompted by the supineness or venality of their constituents, overleap the known barriers of this Constitution and violate the unalienable rights of humanity: it will only serve to show, that no compact among men (however provident in its construction and sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting and inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no Wall of words, that no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other." ~ George Washington

"Progressives understand that their program for a government-centered society becomes more plausible the more people believe that work -- individual striving -- is unavailing. Government grows as fatalism grows, and fatalism grows as progressivism inculcates in people the demoralizing -- make that de-moralizing -- belief that they are victims of circumstances." ~ George Will

"One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights." ~ Glenn Woiceshyn

"As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." ~ H.L. Mencken

"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth." ~ H.L. Mencken
 

"What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism." ~ H.L. Mencken

"When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans." ~ H.L. Mencken

"If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say." ~ H.L. Mencken

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

"Sunday — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell." ~ H.L. Mencken

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money." ~ H.L. Mencken

"There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'."  ~ H.L. Mencken

"Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." ~ H.L. Mencken

"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time." ~  H. L. Mencken

"I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air -- that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave." ~ H.L. Mencken

"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 only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have." ~ H.L. Mencken

"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

"Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable." ~ H.L. Mencken
 

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law…that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good." ~ H.L. Mencken

"A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in." ~ H.L. Mencken

"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 aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." ~ H.L. Mencken

"We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Democracy is a form of religion, it is the worship of jackals by jack asses." ~ H.L. Mencken

"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps." ~ H.L. Mencken

"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'." ~ H.L. Mencken

"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

"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society." ~ H.L. Mencken

"All I ask is equal freedom.  When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow." ~ H.L. Mencken

"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are." ~ H.L. Mencken

"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Debate, it seems to me, is one of the most useful of human inventions. It is the mother and father of all free inquiry and honest thought. It tests ideas, detects errors and promotes clear thinking. A man cannot stand up before it without exposing his whole intellectual stock of goods." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself." ~ H.L. Mencken

"A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion." ~ H.L. Mencken

"All I ask is equal freedom.  When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth -- that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it's now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung—the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor—coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another." ~ Hannah Arendt

"Wherever politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by saying what people like to hear rather than what is demonstrably true. Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insincerity and mendacity." ~ Hans Sennholz

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." ~ Harper Lee

"The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, 'See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk'." ~ Harry Browne

"You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants." ~ Harry Browne

"The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it." ~ Harry Browne

"For those looking for security, be forewarned that there's nothing more insecure than a political promise." ~ Harry Browne

"We should never define libertarian positions in terms coined by liberals and conservatives, nor as some variant of their positions. We are not fiscally conservative and socially liberal. We are libertarians, who believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility on all issues at all times." ~ Harry Browne

"Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." ~ Heinrich Heine

"One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, ‘I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it." ~ Henrik Ibsen

"One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, 'I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it." ~ Henrik Ibsen

"The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can ever help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority." ~ Henrik Ibsen

"The fate of the coun­try does not de­pend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not de­pend on what kind of pa­per you drop into the bal­lot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your cham­ber into the street every morning." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." ~ Henry David Thoreau
 

"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?" ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or back gammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it....Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"The fate of the country...does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"The fate of the country...does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"If I have worked harder and built myself a good house while you have been content to live in a hovel, the tax gatherer now comes annually to make me pay a penalty for my energy and industry by taxing me more than you. If I have saved while you wasted, I am [taxed] while you are exempt. If a man built a ship, we make him pay for his temerity as though he had done injury to the state; if a railroad be opened, down comes the tax collector upon it as though were a public nuisance.... We punish with a tax the man who covers barren fields with ripening grain; we fine him who puts up machinery and him who drains a swamp." ~ Henry George

"Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own." ~ Henry Grady Weaver

"Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means." ~ Henry Grady Weaver

"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity." ~ Henry Hazlitt

"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance." ~ Henry Miller

"America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous.  They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"All socialism involves slavery." ~ Herbert Spencer

"A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited." ~ Herbert Spencer

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

"Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they express, or the words they speak or write." ~ Hugo Black

"Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority – literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social, and even political." ~ Ignazio Silone

"But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you -- the social reformers -- see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them." ~ Isaiah Berlin

"All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate." ~ Isaiah Berlin

"Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday...skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side...in the great ideological wars of our time." ~ Isaiah Berlin

"The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the united States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it. Statists believe that their lives -- their very being -- are a privilege that the state has given to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- dependent on the consent of the government. Thus, statists support such devices as income taxation, licensing laws, regulations, passports, trade restrictions, and the like." ~ Jacob Hornberger

"In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process—learning the same “official history,” the same “civic virtues,” the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the individual soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political officials wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was the worship of the nation-state and obedience to the duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite." ~ Jacob Hornberger

"The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the united States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it. Statists believe that their lives -- their very being -- are a privilege that the state has given to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- dependent on the consent of the government." ~ Jacob Hornberger

"Politicians nowadays treat Americans like medical orderlies treat Alzheimer’s patients, telling them anything that will keep them subdued. It doesn’t matter what untruths the people are fed because they will not long remember. But in politics, forgotten falsehoods almost guarantee new treachery." ~ James Bovard

"To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck." ~ James Bovard

"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

"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death." ~ James Madison

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." ~ James Madison

"Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death." ~ James Madison

"There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation." ~ James Madison

"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

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." ~ James Madison

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

"There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong." ~ James Madison

"There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong." ~ James Madison

"[Y]ou will understand the game behind the curtain too well not to perceive the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government." ~ James Madison

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance." ~ James Madison

"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." ~ James Madison

"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home." ~ James Madison

"The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools." ~ James Russell Lowell

"Collectivism often sounds humane because it stresses the importance of human needs. In reality, it is little more than a rationalization for sacrificing you and me to the desires of others." ~ Jarret Wollstein

"Fortunately, there is a weapon for preserving life and liberty that can be wielded effectively by almost anyone -- the handgun. Small and light enough to be carried habitually, lethal, but unlike the knife or sword, not demanding great skill or strength, it truly is the 'great equalizer.' Requiring only hand-eye coordination and a modicum of ability to remain cool under pressure, it can be used effectively by the old and the weak against the young and the strong, by the one against the many." ~ Jeffrey Snyder

"Why doesn't everybody just leave everybody else the hell alone?" ~ Jimmy Durante

"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

"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." ~ Johann von Schiller

"He alone deserves liberty and life who daily must win them anew." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either psychopaths or mountebanks." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing." ~ John Adams

"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws...." ~ John Adams

"Corruption, like a cancer … eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole of society." ~ John Adams

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." ~ John Adams

"Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots." ~ John Adams

"We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest." ~ John Adams

"Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would." ~ John Adams

"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.... And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about...." ~ John Adams

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." ~ John Adams

"Our whole system of banks is a violation of every honest principle of banks. There is no honest bank but a bank of deposit. A bank that issues paper at interest is a pickpocket or a robber. But the delusion will have its course....An aristocracy is growing out of them that will be as fatal as the feudal barons if unchecked in time." ~ John Adams

"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people." ~ John Adams

"It is the duty of a citizen in a free country not to fit into society, but to make society." ~ John Holt

"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

"...every Man has a Property in his own Person. This nobody has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his." ~ John Locke

"Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his." ~ John Locke

"Self defence is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself!" ~ John Locke

"[H]e that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary." ~ John Locke

"The power to tax is the power to destroy." ~ John Marshall

"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, and the punishment of his guilt." ~ John Philpot Curran

"Patrick Henry did not say, 'Give me absolute safety or give me death'." ~ John Stossel

"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished." ~ John Stuart Mill

"Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest." ~ John Stuart Mill

"The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." ~ John Stuart Mill
 

"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism." ~ John Stuart Mill

"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

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." ~ John Stuart Mill

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." ~ John Stuart Mill

"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished." ~ John Stuart Mill

"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men." ~ John Stuart Mill

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant." ~ John Stuart Mill

"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished." ~ John Stuart Mill

"Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat?  No wonder school is compulsory." ~ John Taylor Gatto

"To change masters is not to be free." ~ Jose Marti y Perez

 "The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself." ~ Joseph Sobran

"Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what your government is doing to you." ~ Joseph Sobran

"People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us." ~ Joseph Sobran

"The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of 'freedom'."

"Since outright slavery has been discredited, 'democracy' is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept." ~ Joseph Sobran

"Politicians never accuse you of ‘greed’ for wanting other people’s money—only for wanting to keep your own money." ~ Joseph Sobran

"In the current political vocabulary, ‘need’ means wanting to get someone else’s money.  ‘Greed,’ which used to mean what “need” now means, has come to mean wanting to keep your own.  ‘Compassion’ means the politician’s willingness to arrange the transfer." ~ Joseph Sobran

"People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We’ll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us." ~ Joseph Sobran

"Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs.  Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right." ~ Joseph Sobran

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

"Politicians need human misery....Government’s a disease masquerading as its own cure." ~ L. Neil Smith

"Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice." ~ Lao-Tzu

"We who embrace liberty don't believe in shooting people because they don't conform, and that is ultimately what socialism and communism are all about.  We don't plan other people's lives, because we're too busy at the full-time job of reforming and improving our own.  We believe in persuasion, not coercion.  We solve problems at penpoint, not gunpoint.  We're never so smug in our beliefs that we're ready to dragoon the rest of society into our schemes." ~ Larry Reed

"There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won." ~ Judge Learned Hand

"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." ~ Learned Hand

"In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty." ~ Leo Tolstoy

"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful." ~ Leo Tolstoy

"I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong.  If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." ~ Lord Acton

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks." ~ Lord Acton

"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control." ~ 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

"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." ~ Louis Brandeis

"The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people." ~ Louis D. Brandeis

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

"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are US government institutions.  They are not... they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the US for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders.  The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history.  Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government.  It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations.  It makes and breaks governments at will." ~ Louis McFadden

"We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the FED. They are not government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers..." ~ Louis McFadden

"Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs." ~ 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

"The program of [classical] liberalism, condensed into a single word, would have to read: property." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The struggle for freedom ... is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities -- sometimes of a minority of but one man -- against the majority." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. It is a process." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia!" ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Those who call themselves 'liberals' today are asking for policies which are precisely the opposite of those policies which the liberals of the nineteenth century advocated in their liberal programs. The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial -- that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight!" ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state." ~ Ludwig von Mises

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

"Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenseless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will perform them." ~ Lysander Spooner

"For more than six hundred years -- that is, since the Magna Carta in 1215 -- there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust, oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating or resisting the execution of such laws." ~ Lysander Spooner

"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved." ~ Lysander Spooner

"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved." ~ Lysander Spooner

"If those persons, who fancy themselves gifted with both the power and the right to define and punish other men’s vices, would but turn their thoughts inwardly, they would probably find that they have a great work to do at home; and that, when that shall have been completed, they will be little disposed to do more towards correcting the vices of others, than simply to give to others the results of their experience and observation." ~ Lysander Spooner

"No government knows any limits to its power except the endurance of the people." ~ Lysander Spooner

"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved." ~ Lysander Spooner

"Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"We must become the change we want to see in the world." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts – that is where the battle should be fought." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form.  The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine,
it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born...is to live the life of a child forever." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced. If the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt, people must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."  ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 BC

"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Today’s political leaders demonstrate their low opinion of the public with every social law they pass. They believe that, if given the right to chose, the citizenry will probably make the wrong choice. Legislators do not think any more in terms of persuading people; they feel the need to force their agenda on the public at the point of a bayonet and the barrel of a gun." ~ Mark Skousen

"In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . . Let’s not go there." ~ Mark Steyn

"Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense." ~ Mark Twain

"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." ~ Mark Twain

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." ~ Mark Twain
 

"There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress." ~ Mark Twain

"Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of." ~ Mark Twain

"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't.  You cannot shirk this and be a man.  To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may." ~ Mark Twain

"The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin." ~ Mark Twain

"Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state." ~ Mark Twain

"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits." ~ Mark Twain

"We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove." ~ Mark Twain

"Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." ~ Mark Twain

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." ~ Mark Twain

"Some want prayer in school, some want condoms.  Printing prayers on condoms satisfies nobody." ~ Marshall Fritz

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime."  ~ Max Stirner

"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself." ~ Michel de Montaigne

"Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it." ~ Mikhail Bakunin
 

"The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another." ~ Milton Friedman

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence." ~ Milton Friedman

"The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books." ~ Milton Friedman

"Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." ~ Milton Friedman

"The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-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

"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

"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 government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem." ~ Milton Friedman

"There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions." ~ 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

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence." ~ Milton Friedman

"The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the
neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." ~ Milton Friedman

"[Drug use] does harm a great many other people, but primarily because it's prohibited. There are an enormous number of innocent victims now. You've got the people whose purses are stolen, who are bashed over the head by people trying to get enough money for their next fix. You've got the people killed in the random drug wars. You've got the corruption of the legal establishment. You've got the innocent victims who are taxpayers who have to pay for more and more prisons, and more and more prisoners, and more and more police. You've got the rest of us who don't get decent law enforcement because all the law enforcement officials are busy trying to do the impossible. And, last, but not least, you've got the people of Colombia and Peru and so on. What business do we have destroying and leading to the killing of thousands of people in Colombia because we cannot enforce our own laws? If we could enforce our laws against drugs, there would be no market for these drugs." ~ Milton Friedman

"[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends." ~ Milton Friedman

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence." ~ Milton Friedman

"In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place." ~ Mohandas Gandhi

"Human life is not some sort of race or game in which each person should start from an identical mark. It is an attempt by each man to be as happy as possible." ~ Murray Rothbard

"It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost." ~ Murray Rothbard

"Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the state is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist." ~ Murray Rothbard

"It's ours to right the great wrong done,
Ten thousand years ago --
The State, conceived in blood and hate,
Remains our only foe!
Oh, join us, brothers, join us, sisters,
Victory is nigh!
Come meet your fate, destroy the State,
And raise black banners high!"
~ Murray Rothbard

"The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State...is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State." ~ Murray Rothbard

"You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'" ~ Neal Boortz

"When you disarm your subjects, however, you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any body of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States." ~ Noah Webster

"If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all." ~ Noam Chomsky
 

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.  Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." ~ Oscar Wilde

"The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm." ~ P.D. Ouspensky

"Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"Now majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for.  But, like other precious, sacred things...it’s not only worth dying for, it can make you wish you were dead.  Imagine if all life were determined by majority rule.  Every meal would be a pizza." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"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 tax that was supposed to soak the rich has instead soaked America. The beneficiary of the income tax has not been the poor, but big government. The income tax has given us a government bureaucracy that outnumbers the manufacturing work force. It has created welfare dependencies that have entrapped millions of Americans in an underclass that is forced to live a sordid existence of trading votes for government handouts." ~ Paul Craig Roberts

"In U.S. politics, 'compassion' means giving money and privileges to well organized interest groups at everyone else's expense." ~ Paul Craig Roberts

"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader." ~ Plato

"Do not expect justice where might is right." ~ Plato

"A tyrant... is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader." ~ Plato