Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"There can be no assumption that today’s majority is “right” and the Amish or others like them are “wrong.” A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no right or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different."

~ Justice Warren E. Burger  

"In any free society, the conflict between
social conformity and individual liberty
is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary."

~ Kathleen Norris  

"Democracy, which began by liberating man politically,
has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through
the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion."

~ Ludwig Lewisohn  

"To include freedom in the very definition of democracy
is to define a process not by its actual characteristics
as a process but by its hoped for results.
This is not only intellectually invalid, it is,
in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance
to some of the unwanted consequences of the process."

~ Thomas Sowell  

"We are discreet sheep;
we wait to see how the drove is going,
and then go with the drove."

~ Mark Twain  

"I don't care who does the electing,
so long as I get to do the nominating."

~ William Marcy Tweed  

"To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest.

But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."

~ Henry David Thoreau  

"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it.
Democracy attaches all possible value to each man;
socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number.
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality.
But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty,
socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."

~ Alexis de Tocqueville  

"Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making,
absolutist shape which we have given to it is,
it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation."

~ Bertrand de Jouvenel  

"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.
In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community,
and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended,
not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents,
but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the
major number of the Constituents."

~ James Madison  

"The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people."

~ Bill Clinton (Questionable)  

"Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure."

~ Anthony de Jasay  

"Characteristically, however, the overthrow of the dictator
simply means that there will be another dictator. ...
the policies they follow will probably not be radically different.
If we look around the world, we quickly realize that these policies
will not be radically different from those that would be followed
by a democracy either."

~ Gordon Tullock