Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians and social workers as ominous and dangerous."

~ W. G. Hill  

"The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State,
including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers,
is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State."

~ Murray N. Rothbard  

~ Adam Smith  

"All theory is against freedom of the will;
all experience for it."

~ Dr. Samuel Johnson  

"Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do
what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce
their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are
the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny."

~ Barry Goldwater  

"What has always made the state a hell on earth
has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven."

~ Friedrich Hoelderlin  

"Besides, to lay and collect internal taxes in this extensive country must require a great number of congressional ordinances, immediately operation upon the body of the people; these must continually interfere with the state laws and thereby produce disorder and general dissatisfaction till the one system of laws or the other, operating upon the same subjects, shall be abolished."

~ Federal Farmer  

"Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And it the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice,
that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians
have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"History will also give Occasion to expatiate on the Advantage of Civil Orders and Constitutions, how Men and their Properties are protected by joining in Societies and establishing Government; their Industry encouraged and rewarded, Arts invented, and Life made more comfortable: The Advantages of Liberty, Mischiefs of Licentiousness, Benefits arising from good Laws and a due Execution of Justice, &c. Thus may the first Principles of sound Politicks be fix'd in the Minds of Youth."

~ Benjamin Franklin  

"Instead of fostering a system that enables people to help themselves, America is now saddled with a system that destroys value, raises costs, hinders innovation and relegates millions of citizens to a life of poverty, dependency and hopelessness. This is what happens when elected officials believe that people’s lives are better run by politicians and regulators than by the people themselves. Those in power fail to see that more government means less liberty, and liberty is the essence of what it means to be American. Love of liberty is the American ideal."

~ Charles Koch  

"Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice: the destructive power resides within. Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes, the worm eats away the wood; but greatest of all evils is envy, impious habitant of corrupt souls, which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease."

~ Menander  

"It is apparent from the whole context of the Constitution as well as the history of the times which gave birth to it, that it was the purpose of the Convention to establish a currency consisting of the precious metals. These were adopted by a permanent rule excluding the use of a perishable medium of exchange, such as certain agricultural commodities recognized by the statutes of some States as tender for debts, or the still more pernicious expedient of paper currency."

~ Andrew Jackson  

"Crime is contagious.
If the government becomes a law breaker,
it breeds contempt for the law."

~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis  

"The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life."

~ Thomas Jefferson