Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."

~ Lord Acton  

"The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."

~ Milton Friedman  

"Government can do something for the people
only in proportion as it can do something to the people. "

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"An important art of politicians
is to find new names for institutions
which under old names have become
odious to the public."

~ Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord  

"Power corrupts. But it does more than that.
Power attracts the corrupt, then corrupts them further."

~ Don Matthews  

"Society is produced by our wants,
and government by our wickedness."

~ Thomas Paine  

"In the general course of human nature, A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will."

~ Alexander Hamilton  

"Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else. "

~ P. J. O'Rourke  

~ Woodrow Wilson  

"It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. "

~ Calvin Coolidge  

~ Lyndon B. Johnson  

"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. That government is best which governs least."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"History suggests that the cause of national decline is, as a rule, that the state in the nation concerned has sought to do too much rather than too little. This applies as much to the Roman Empire as to the Spanish. "

~ Hugh Thomas  

"Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers."

~ John C. Calhoun  

"By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments. The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments, that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity."

~ John Hospers