Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust,
because the results are not intended or foreseen."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors."

~ Henry Becque  

"Democracy, though slowly attained and never by revolutionary jumps, is the best government on earth when it tries to make all its citizens aristocrats. But not when it guillotines whoever is individual, superior, or just different."

~ Peter Viereck  

"Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind to rule, springing out of, and necessarily to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is the same in all cases -- less government."

~ Herbert Spencer  

"I have always believed that government had a limited capacity
to do good and a virtually infinite capacity to do harm..."

~ Neil Hamilton  

"Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?"

~ Thomas Paine  

"Government machinery has been described
as a marvelous labor saving device which
enables ten men to do the work of one."

~ John Maynard Keynes  

"The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude."

~ Roger Scruton  

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

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"Put no faith in salvation through the political order."

~ Augustine of Hippo  

"But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power
is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go."

~ Charles-Louis de Secondat  

"Take nothing on its looks;
take everything on evidence.
There's no better rule."

~ Charles Dickens  

"All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward."

~ Ellen Glasgow  

"If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked."

~ Gerald Gilder  

"A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either."

~ Thomas Paine