Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"[E]conomic liberty and creative entrepreneurship are the basis of any solution to today’s social and economic difficulties. Blaming business, setting wages, and attempting to run the economy by decree from Washington only exacerbates the problems. Consider the minimum wage. It seems so simple: Tell business to pay its workers more. But a hike in the minimum wage is essentially a tax, punishing precisely those companies that hire workers with the least skills."

~ Doug Bandow  

"Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market."

~ John Stossel  

"The shallow consider liberty a release from all law,
from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary,
the potent Law of Laws."

~ Walt Whitman  

"Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one’s fellow man ... that’s what competition is all about: “out pleasing” your competitors to win over the consumers."

~ Walter E. Williams  

"Here I close my opinion.
I could not say less in view of questions of such gravity
that go down to the very foundations of the government.
If the provisions of the Constitution can be set aside
by an Act of Congress, where is the course of usurpation to end?
The present assault upon capital is but the beginning.
It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping,
till our political contests will become a war of the poor
against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness."

~ Justice Stephen J. Field  

"The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty."

~ Justice William O. Douglas  

"Bear in mind this sacred principle,
that though the will of the majority
is in all cases to prevail,
that will to be rightful must be reasonable;
that the minority possess their equal rights,
which equal law must protect,
and to violate would be oppression."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"Society is composed of men, and every man is a FREE agent. Since man is free, he can choose; since he can choose, he can err; since he can err, he can suffer. I go further: He must err and he must suffer; for his starting point is ignorance, and in his ignorance he sees before him an infinite number of unknown roads, all of which save one lead to error."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"No external force will ever succeed in making you 'want what you do not want and believe what you do not believe'. A man may take my life, but not my faith."

~ Gerhard Oestreich  

"Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind."

~ James Wilson  

"A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device
to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie."

~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Questionable)  

"Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty."

~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin  

"The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal."

~ Ayn Rand