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|  John Adams | It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives. | |
| John Adams | Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil. | |
| John Adams | We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest. | |
| Saint Thomas Aquinas | The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing. | |
| Hannah Arendt | No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny. | |
| Auntie Mame | Life is a banquet - and most poor suckers are starving. | |
| Marcus Aurelius | The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. | |
| James Baldwin | Freedom is not something that can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself. | |
| 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? | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest. | |
| Neal Boortz | You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?' | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | They: The makers of the Constitution: conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. | |
| H. Jackson Brown, Jr. | People take different roads seeking fulfillment & happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost. | |
| Robert Browning | Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for? | |
| Buddha | Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it. | |
| James Burgh | All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people. | |
| Lord Byron | The wish, which ages have not yet subdued
In man, to have no master save his mood. | |
| Dr. Ben Carson | The more solid the family foundation, the more likely you are to be able to resist peer pressure. Human beings are social creatures. We all want to belong, we all have that desire, and we will belong, one way or another. If the family doesn’t provide that, the peers will, or a gang will, or you will find something to belong to. That’s why it becomes so critical for families with young children to understand what a critical anchor they are. | |
| Frank Chodorov | If for no other reason, personal pride should prompt every governor and state legislator to take a secessionist attitude; they were not elected to be lackeys of the federal bureaucracy. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability. | |
| R. G. Collingwood | Perfect Freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work, and in that work does what he wants to do. | |
| Charles Caleb Colton | Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed. | |
| Richard Cowan | One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could. | |
| Davy Crockett | I want people to be able to get what they need to live: enough food, a place to live, and an education for their children. Government does not provide these as well as private charities and businesses. | |
| Ellwood P. Cubberley | Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down. | |
| e. e. cummings | To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. | |
| Leonardo da Vinci | One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. | |
| Michel de Montaigne | Not being able to govern events, I govern myself. | |
| Declaration of Independence | The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.— Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world... | |
| Robert Dowlut | Because this right [of self-defense] cannot be effectively exercised with bare hands, the right to keep and bear arms is the only efficient way to secure the fundamental right of self-defense. | |
| Wayne Dunn | The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a 'psychological confession' on their part. In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive. | |
| Albert Einstein | He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. | |
| Financial Times | Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | That is simple. In the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay no one. | |
| Robert Frost | Freedom lies in being bold. | |
| Margaret Fuller | I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. ... Freedom and slavery are mental states. Therefore, the first thing to say to yourself: 'I shall no longer accept the role of a slave. I shall not obey orders as such but shall disobey them when they are in conflict with my conscience'. | |
| John Taylor Gatto | Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another. | |
| Edward Gibbon | The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The best of all government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves. | |
| Edward Everett Hale | I am only one. But still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that
the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete
security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority. | |
| Hannibal | We will either find a way or make one. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | The great trouble with religion – any religion – is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason – but one cannot have both. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not a sin - just stupid.) | |
| Nat Hentoff | Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices – taking advantage of our freedom of speech – who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do. | |
| William P. Hoar | If ... our bureaucratic masters are becoming more akin to Soviet-style or Eastern European counterparts, it was rarely seen as a plus that those central schemers had wonderful intentions with their five-year plans. Such goals as "job safety," "equality," and freedom from "discrimination," depending on their definitions, may be good things for society, but they were never intended to be the business of the federal government. | |
| Laura Hollis | [T]he greatest problem facing the United States today is not racism; it is the disappearance of the can-do attitude that built the country, ... We’ve lost the sense of individual responsibility for our problems, and that’s bad enough. But what’s worse, we’re losing faith in our ability to solve our problems. This acquired sense of helplessness is catastrophic, and it has paralyzed large swaths of the American public – rural, urban and suburban. … Encouraging dependence upon government not only creates generations of helpless people; it inures them to government’s ineffectiveness. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. | There never was an idea stated that woke men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank. | |
| John Holt | No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free. | |
| I Ching | Mistrust the people and they become untrustworthy. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We are all doubtless bound to contribute a certain portion of our income to the support of charitable and other useful public institutions. But it is a part of our duty also to apply our contributions in the most effectual way we can to secure this object. The question then is whether this will not be better done by each of us appropriating our whole contribution to the institutions within our reach, under our own eye, and over which we can exercise some useful control? Or would it be better that each should divide the sum he can spare among all the institutions of his State or the United States? Reason and the interest of these institutions themselves, certainly decide in favor of the former practice. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty; and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the State, and calls for an exercise of the power of dissolution. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [We should be] determined... to sever ourselves from the union
we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government...
in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation... to a continuance in union... I have no hesitation in saying, 'let us separate.' | |
| Helen Keller | Security is mostly superstition. | |
| David Kelley | To say "I have to" is to speak the language of compulsion, duty, authority -- the language of injunctions imposed on us from without. Objectivism is not a duty ethic, but an ethic of values, the ultimate value being one's own life and happiness. The language of values is "I want" and "I will": I want this, and I will do what it takes to get it. | |
| David Kelley | Dividing the political positions into liberal versus conservative is itself a leading example of [an old conceptual framework that organizes the world into categories and stereotypes] shared by journalists and media activists alike. As a result, it has taken decades for libertarians in the United States to break through this conventional view of the political spectrum and gain recognition as a distinct point of view. Over and above any hostility journalists had to free-market views, there was no conceptual space within their conventional wisdom for a political philosophy that combined free markets and free minds. | |
| Jack Kemp | Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort. | |
| John F. Kennedy | The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion. | |
| James Larkin | The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise. | |
| C. S. Lewis | I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | [I]f the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | America will never be destroyed from the outside.
If we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves. | |
| John Locke | [W]henever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty. | |
| John Locke | The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves. | |
| John Locke | The Care therefore of every man's Soul belongs unto himself, and is to be left unto himself. But what if he neglect the Care of his Soul? I answer, What if he neglects the Care of his Health, or of his Estate, which things are nearlier related to the Government of the Magistrate than the other? Will the magistrate provide by an express Law, That such an one shall not become poor or sick? Laws provide, as much as is possible, that the Goods and Health of Subjects be not injured by the Fraud and Violence of others; they do not guard them from the Negligence or Ill-husbandry of the Possessors themselves. | |
| Barry Lopez | How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | Last, but by no means least, courage -- moral courage, the courage of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle -- the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other. | |
| James Madison | As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: So there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us, faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another. | |
| Norman Mailer | Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer. | |
| Nelson Mandela | Once a person is determined to help themselves, there is nothing that can stop them. | |
| George Mason | Government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit and security of the people, nation or community; whenever any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, unalienable, indefeasible right, to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public Weal. | |
| Donald S. McAlvaney | In every declining civilization there is a small "remnant" of people who adhere to the right against the wrong; who recognize the difference between good and evil and who will take an active stand for the former and against the latter; who can still think and discern and who will courageously take a stand against the political, social, moral, and spiritual rot or decay of their day. | |
| Donald S. McAlvaney | Switzerland, on the other hand, insists that every male of military age must keep a powerful, fully automatic assault rifle in his home. Every home must be armed -- by law -- and some even keep mortars. Yet Switzerland has one of the most law-abiding citizenry, the lowest crime rate, and least violence of any country in the free world. And it has remained free for over a thousand years. Compare it to New York and Washington where handguns are completely banned. In fact, in Washington, Chief of Police Maurice Turner recently said that the District of Columbia gun ban law had completely failed, and he has called for armed citizen's police auxiliary to help restore order. | |
| Bob McEwen | In the 1950’s [America was] the richest nation, the richest city on earth was Detroit. They voted for change and so now it is the poorest city in America. At the same time, the nation of South Korea, of all the nations on earth, was third from the bottom. Virtually the poorest nation on earth. It is now tenth from the top. If you understand the principle, the greater freedom, the greater the wealth, you can then put any nation [on this chart]. Now you can go to Tagusagopos, you can go to Buenos Aires, you can go to Cairo, you can go to Philadelphia and all you need to know is what percentage of the Gross Domestic Product is controlled by government, and the greater the government, the greater the poverty, and that’s all politics is about. Every day politicians say, “I can make a better decision for you than you can for yourself, and let me take your money away from you and make it on your behalf” and thus make the nation poorer. | |
| James McGuigan | Rules are written for those who lack the ability to truly reason. But for those who can, rules become nothing more than guidelines, and live their lives governed not by rules but by reason. | |
| Margaret Mead | My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country
more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a
good citizen driven to despair. | |
| H. L. Mencken | 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 | [T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people. | |
| John Morley | [L]iberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving people to think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing. It is the object of a favourable presumption. The burden of proving it inexpedient always lies, and wholly lies, on those who wish to abridge it by coercion, whether direct or indirect. | |
| Huey P. Newton | Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny. | |
| James Oppenheim | They can only set free men free ...
And there is no need of that:
Free men set themselves free. | |
| Thomas Paine | There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the `end of time,’ or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. ... Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. | |
| Wendell Phillips | A large body of people, sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right? Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right? ... I maintain on the principles of '76 that Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter. ... You can never make such a war popular. ... The North never will endorse such a war. | |
| Plutarch | What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. | |
| Roman Proverb | It is better to live one day as a lion, than one hundred years as a sheep | |
| Proverbs | The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going. | |
| Ayn Rand | The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind. | |
| Ayn Rand | Make no mistake about it -- and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society. Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the benefit it brings to the poor. All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not its goal, purpose or moral justification. The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man -- every man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone's need. | |
| Ayn Rand | We [entrepreneurs] required that you leave us free to function -- free to think and work as we choose ... -- free to earn our own profits and make our own fortunes ... Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high. | |
| Ayn Rand | I refuse to apologize for my ability -- I refuse to apologize for my success -- I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it. | |
| Edmund Randolph | A people who mean to continue free must be prepared to meet danger in person; not rely upon the fallacious protection of mercenary armies. | |
| Jon Rappoport | From the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took charge, he busied himself with this question: 'What can I say and do that will make my people react the way I want them to.' He was the first Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then, only the means and methods have changed. | |
| Jon Rappoport | Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program. | |
| Jon Rappoport | There is an irreducible thing. It's called freedom. It is native to every individual. Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes. And he asks himself: what is my freedom for? And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze. If he pursues it long enough, it takes him out of the labyrinth. | |
| Jon Rappoport | Think about the agendas behind universal vaccination, climate change, universal psychiatric treatment, GMO food, and other 'science-based' frauds. They all imply a false collectivist model, in which individuals give up their power in exchange for 'doing good' and becoming members of the largest group in the world: 'disabled' people with needs that must be addressed and satisfied. Instead of supporting the liberation of the individual, the controllers want to squash it. Why? Because they fear individual power. It is forever the unpredictable wild card. They want a society in which every thought an individual thinks connects him to a greater whole---and if that sounds attractive, understand that this Whole is a fiction, intentionally faked to resemble a genuine oceanic feeling. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? | |
| Florence Robinson | If the people will lead, eventually the leaders will follow. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants? | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of others. He must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow man a responsibility which is not theirs. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. | |
| Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr. | The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind. When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being viewed dogmatically, they are held tentatively, with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. | |
| Eric Schaub | Freedom is risky.
Nature makes no promises. | |
| Eric Schaub | There is no Freedom without Courage. | |
| Eric Schaub | The process of liberation is continuous. | |
| Eric Schaub | Some truths need to be learned from the inside. | |
| Eric Schaub | I am not free until I say so.
And there's a good chance
I am going to have to fight once I do.
Ever since I declared my Independence,
I have had to support and defend it. | |
| John Seabrook | The net poses a fundamental threat not only to the authority of the government, but to all authority, because it permits people to organize, think, and influence one another without any institutional supervision whatsoever. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Besides, he who follows another not only discovers nothing but is not even investigating. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | What then? Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself. | |
| General David M. Shoup | I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans. | |
| Adam Smith | It is not the benevolence of the butcher, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their 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. | |
| Adam Smith | The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security is so powerful a principle that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations; though the effect of these obstructions is always more or less either to encroach upon its freedom, or to diminish its security. | |
| Lillian Smith | Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college. | |
| Jeffrey R. Snyder | As the Founding Fathers knew well, a government that does not trust its honest, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of self-defense is not itself worthy of trust. Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant, of the people. | |
| Charles T. Sprading | Does it not seem a vast waste of valuable human material that the pioneers of thought, those who by their genius dare to clear unknown paths in the arts and sciences and in government, should have to conform to the dictates of that non-creative, slow-moving mass, the majority? An appeal to the majority is a resort to force and not an appeal to intelligence; the majority is always ignorant, and by increasing the majority we multiply ignorance. The majority is incapable of initiative, its attitude being one of opposition toward everything that is new. If it had been left to the majority, the world would never have had the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, or any of the conveniences of modern life. | |
| John Stossel | I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market. | |
| Anthony Sutton | [T]he power system continues only as long as individuals try to get something for nothing. The day when a majority of individuals declares or acts as if it wants nothing from the government, declares that it will look after its own welfare and interests, then on that day the power elites are doomed. | |
| William Howard Taft | Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity. | |
| Amy Tan | In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances you were born with. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | I'm never quite sure what you mean by consensus politics. I believe that what most people want in their lives, is what the Conservative Party wants to have for them. I believe that our policies are fundamentally common sense policies. Just let's take taxation for an example. Wherever I go I hear enormous resentment about the amount which people are paying out of their own pay packet in tax. And, this goes right across the income ranges. Socialism started by saying it was going to tax the rich, very rapidly it was taxing the middle income groups. Now, it's taxing people quite highly with incomes way below average and pensioners with incomes way below average. You look at the figure on the beginning of a pay slip, sometimes it can look quite high, look along the slip to the other end, and see how many deductions you've had off, those deductions have increased enormously under Socialism ...
Public expenditure, which they always boast about, is financed out of the pay packet in our pockets. People are saying that they really think too much is being taken out of the pay packet for someone to spend on their behalf, and they'd rather be left with more, and it's now well-known that Socialist Governments put up taxes and Conservative Governments take them down. It's part of our fundamental belief giving the people more choice to spend their own money in their own way. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom. | |
| Dorothy Thompson | It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man? | |
| Henry David Thoreau | As for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. | |
| James Thornton | Before the creation of the welfare state, immigrants who came to this country were for the most part attracted by America’s
reputation as a land of freedom and opportunity. Laws and customs that then prevailed required immigrants to carve out their individual destinies by
their own labor, perseverance, intelligence, and determination. | |
| G. M. Trevelyan | Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the blood of real civilization. | |
| Pierre Trudeau | A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values. | |
| Mark Twain | I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. | |
| Mark Twain | Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. | |
| 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. | |
| U. S. Treasury | Mind Your Business | |
| Armando Valladares | Just as there is a very short distance between the U.S. and Cuba, there is a very short distance between a democracy and a dictatorship where the government gets to decide what to do, how to think, and how to live. And sometimes your freedom is not taken away at gunpoint, but instead it is done one piece of paper at a time, one seemingly meaningless rule at a time, one small silencing at a time. Never allow the government – or anyone else – to tell you what you can or cannot believe or what you can and cannot say or what your conscience tells you to have to do or not do. | |
| Mark Van Doren | To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in. | |
| Vincent van Gogh | The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore. | |
| Virginia Resolution of 1798 | [T]his Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the Federal Government, as resulting from the compact, to which the States are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the States who are parties thereto, have the right, and are duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them. | |
| 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. | |
| George Washington | A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one nation the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation. | |
| George Washington | It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn. | |
| Daniel Webster | If the Union was formed by accession of States then
the Union may be dissolved by the secession of States. | |
| Daniel Webster | The States are nations. | |
| Daniel Webster | If the States were not left to leave the Union when their rights were interfered with, the government would have been National, but the Convention refused to baptize it by that name. | |
| Oscar Wilde | Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. | |
| George Will | Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights. | |
| Marianne Williamson | And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power, and to set up among the really free and self governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles. | |
| Arthur Young | Give a man secure possession of a bleak rock and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years lease of a garden and he will turn it into a desert. | |
| Frank Zappa | Rock music was never written for or performed for conservative tastes. | |
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