All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation
of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his
natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all
Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the
Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore
by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick
shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society
on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can
have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his
Club towards the Support of it.more Benjamin Franklin quotes | Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society.more David D. Friedman quotes | Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.more Milton Friedman quotes | The power of the state to impose restraints and burdens upon persons and property in conservation and promotion of the public health, good order, and prosperity is a power originally and always belonging to the states, not surrendered to them by the general government, nor directly restrained by the constitution of the United States, and essentially exclusive.more Justice Melville Fuller quotes | Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite; who made ten thousand people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?more David Lloyd George quotes | Private ownership of land is the nether mill-stone. Material progress is the upper mill-stone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground.more Henry George quotes | It is the paper money created out of thin air that creates the unfair distribution of wealth that is making the middle class fall more behind and the poor more poor. Newly created money and credit in a paper money system benefits those that can access the money first and buy capital goods and real property at one price before the new money circulates and makes all prices go up. Wages also do not keep up with inflation and that creates another squeeze on the middle class.more Kenneth Gerbino quotes | | A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince.more Edward Gibbon quotes | In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.more Alan Greenspan quotes | | In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.more Alan Greenspan quotes | The IRS is an extraordinary example of the end justifying the means. The means of this agency is growth. It is interesting that the revenue officers within the IRS refer to taxpayers as 'inventory'. The IRS embodies the political realities of the selfish human desire to dominate others. Thus the end of this gigantic pretense of officialdom is power, pure and simple. The meek may inherit the earth, but they will never receive a promotion in an agency where efficiency is measured by the number of seizures of taxpayers' property and by the number of citizens and businesses driven into bankruptcy.more George Hansen quotes | Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind.more Friedrich August von Hayek quotes | | True liberty cannot exist apart from the full rights of property, for property is the only crystallized form of free faculties...The whole meaning of socialism is a systematic glorification of force... No literary phrases about social organisms are potent enough to evaporate the individual, who is the prime, indispensable, irreducible element.more Auberon Herbert quotes | I have said I do not dread industrial corporations as instruments of power to destroy this country, because there are a
thousand agencies which can regulate, restrain and control them; but there is a corporation we may all dread. That corporation is the federal
government. From the aggressions of this corporation, there can be no safety, if it is allowed to go beyond the well defined limits of its
powers. I dread nothing so much as the exercise of ungranted and doubtful powers by the government. It is, in my opinion, the danger of dangers to
the future of this country. Let us be sure to keep it always within its limits. If this great, ambitious, ever growing corporation becomes
oppressive, who shall check it? If it becomes too wayward who shall control it? If it becomes unjust, who shall trust it? As sentinels of the country’s
watchtower, Senators, I beseech you to watch and guard with sleepless dread, that corporation which can make all property and rights, all states and
people, all liberty and hope its plaything in an hour, and its victims forever.more Benjamin H. Hill quotes | We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.more Adolf Hitler quotes | Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he is free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family.more Herbert Hoover quotes | Every day, IRS agents levy liens on homes, bank accounts, and businesses; they confiscate cars, furniture, boats, and other
personal property without the constitutional protections of due notice, hearing, and due process. If a person forcibly resists, government agents kill
him for “resisting arrest.” more Jacob G. Hornberger quotes | Of course, the proponents of political tyranny are usually well-motivated. Those who enacted the gun-registration law in California point to criminals who have used semiautomatic weapons to commit horrible, murderous acts. But the illusion -- the pipe dream -- is that bad acts can be prevented by the deprivation of liberty. They cannot be! Life is always insecure. The only choice is between liberty and insecurity, on the one hand, and insecurity and enslavement on the other. The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government. This is why the gun owners of California might ultimately go down in history as among the greatest and most courageous patriots of our time.more Jacob G. Hornberger quotes | The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned -- the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach -- is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!.more Jacob G. Hornberger quotes | [D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people’s lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became.more Jacob G. Hornberger quotes | The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government.more Jacob G. Hornberger quotes | The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.more Justice Robert H. Jackson quotes | | | I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.more Thomas Jefferson quotes | The constitutions of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property and freedom of the press.more Thomas Jefferson quotes | If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.more Thomas Jefferson quotes | Drug offenses ... may be regarded as the prototypes of non-victim crimes today. The private nature of the sale and use of these drugs has led the police to resort to methods of detection and surveillance that intrude upon our privacy, including illegal search, eavesdropping, and entrapment.
Indeed, the successful prosecution of such cases often requires police infringement of the constitutional protections that safeguard the privacy of individuals.more John Kaplan quotes | | A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them that which they possessed, to see those whom they cherished in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.more Genghis Khan quotes | The Rules for Liberty
1) Don’t hurt people: Free people just want to be left alone, not hassled or harmed by someone else with an agenda or designs over their life and property.
2) Don’t take people’s stuff: America’s founders fought to ensure property rights and our individual right to the fruits of our labors.
3) Take responsibility: Liberty takes responsibility. Don’t sit around waiting for someone else to solve your problems.
4) Work for it: For every action there is an equal reaction. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded.
5) Mind your own business: Free people live and let live.
6) Fight the power: Thanks to the Internet and the decentralization of knowledge, there are more opportunities than ever to take a stand against corrupt authority.more Matt Kibbe quotes | When government will expropriate any wealth that people create, the present value of future output can actually be less than the value of the country's tangible resources. The power of predatory government to destroy wealth is truly awesome.more Arnold Kling quotes | Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political
structure, of these United States protects any American from
arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the
Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the
torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a
cellar.more Rose Wilder Lane quotes | No victim of crime should be required to surrender his life, health, safety, personal dignity, or property to a criminal, nor should a victim be required to retreat in the face of an attack.more Wayne LaPierre quotes | The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.more Arthur Lee quotes | It is true, the yeomanry of the country possess the lands, the weight of property, possess arms, and are too strong a body of men to be openly offended—and, therefore, it is urged, they will take care of themselves, that men who shall govern will not dare pay any disrespect to their opinions. It is easily perceived, that if they have not their proper negative upon passing laws in congress, or on the passage of laws relative to taxes and armies, they may in twenty or thirty years be by means imperceptible to them, totally deprived of that boasted weight and strength: This may be done in great measure by congress.more Richard Henry Lee quotes | | Tis a Mistake to think this Fault [tyranny] is proper only to Monarchies; other Forms of Government are liable to it, as well as that.
For where-ever the Power that is put in any hands for the Government of the People, and the Preservation of their Properties, is applied to other ends,
and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the Arbitrary and Irregular Commands of those that have it: There it presently becomes
Tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many.more John Locke quotes | [E]very Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.more John Locke quotes | | If you look like a rabbit, and act like a rabbit, you will be treated like a rabbit -- prey for all predators.more Stony Loft quotes | | There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.more Thomas Babington Macaulay quotes | A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species.more James Madison quotes | A pure democracy ... can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party... Hence it is that democracies 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 deaths.more James Madison quotes | As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.more James Madison quotes | By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt.more James Madison quotes |
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