Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously—after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth."

~ Robert A. Heinlein  

"The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet."

~ Philip Dormer Stanhope  

"The test of every religious, political,
or educational system, is the man which it forms.
If a system injures the intelligence it is bad.
If it injures the character it is vicious.
If it injures the conscience it is criminal."

~ Henri Frederic Amiel  

"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  

"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 G. Hornberger  

"Love your country but fear its government."

~ Daniel Webster  

~ John Salter  

~ Rudolph J. Rummel  

~ Adolf Hitler  

"Custom may suffice as the basis of law, but is inadequate as the basis of justice. Tyranny, not liberty, has been the custom in the past; and so Libertarians reject custom as a guiding principle, just as they reject power or might. They know that justice is not something that was, or is, but that is to be."

~ Charles T. Sprading  

"Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations."

~ Milton Friedman  

"We should not expect the state to appear in the guise
of an extravagant good fairy at every christening,
a loquacious companion at every stage of life's journey,
and the unknown mourner at every funeral."

~ Margaret Thatcher  

"Freedom does not always win.
This is one of the bitterest lessons of history."

~ A. J. P. Taylor  

~ John Adams