Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex."

~ James Madison  

"Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many business have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations and tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want."

~ Charles Koch  

"There is in all of us a strong disposition
to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate.
This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously
held that things are 'just' because the law makes them so."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"We are so concerned to flatter
the majority that we lose sight
of how very often it is necessary,
in order to preserve freedom
for the minority,
let alone for the individual,
to face that majority down."

~ William F. Buckley, Jr.  

"The fact is that there is a serious danger of this country becoming a pluto-democracy; that is, a sham republic with the real government in the hands of a small clique of enormously wealthy men, who speak through their money, and whose influence, even today, radiates to every corner of the United States."

~ William Gibbs McAdoo  

"[A] deep-rooted culture of incompetence and corruption has made it virtually impossible for government to function fairly and efficiently. And because most government employees are shielded by layers of protection, they couldn't care less. Never before in the history of this nation has there been a greater divide between a self-serving federal leviathan and millions of Americans... 'Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,' Ronald Reagan reminded us during his inaugural address in 1981. Nothing's changed since then, with one exception: It's gotten far worse."

~ Arnold Ahlert  

"What we need to do in this country is make sure the majority of the American people really want their freedoms back again, We have to have people once again believe in liberty, foreign policy that defends America, but is not the policeman of the world. We don't have the right nor the facilities to throw our weight around and tell the rest of the world how to live."

~ Dr. Ron Paul  

"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."

~ James Madison  

"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved."

~ Lysander Spooner  

"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."

~ Justice Millard Fillmore Caldwell  

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together
in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal
system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"The banks -- commercial banks and the Federal Reserve -- create all the money of this nation and its people pay interest on every dollar of that newly created money. Which means that private banks exercise unconstitutionally, immorally, and ridiculously the power to tax the people. For every newly created dollar dilutes to some extent the value of every other dollar already in circulation."

~ Jerry Voorhis  

"Hundreds of thousands of rouble notes are being issued daily by our treasury. This is done, not in order to fill the coffers of the State with practically worthless paper, but with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money as a means of payment. ...
Experience has taught us it is impossible to root out the evils of capitalism merely by confiscation and expropriation… The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is therefore to flood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort. ...[T]he great illusion of the value and power of money, on which the capitalist state is based will have been definitely destroyed."

~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin