Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created."

~ Ludwig von Mises  

"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right,
but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right.
There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream --
the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order --
or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.
Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives,
those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on
this downward path. Plutarch warned,
'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he
who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.'"

~ Ronald Reagan  

"Economic control is not merely control of a sector
of human life that can be separated from the rest;
it is the control of the means for all our ends."

~ Ludwig von Mises  

"You can't save free markets by socialism, I don't know where this idea ever came from. You save free markets by promoting free markets and sound money and balanced budgets. The whole reason why nobody wants to address the real problem is, we're spending a trillion dollars a year overseas running an empire, and it's coming to an end. This country is bankrupt, and we won't admit it. Eventually though, the dollar will go bust, and we will bring our troops home, and we will live within our means, but we ought to do it sensibly, rather than waiting for the collapse of the dollar, and this is what we're doing, we're on the verge of destroying our dollar. And then, you think we have problems now, problems then will be a lot worse, it'd look like the Weimar Republic, or a third world nation. And a lot of people know that, and they're scared to death, but we don't need to be making the problem worse by just propping up everything with more government programs, more inflation, and more helicopters, it won't work."

~ Dr. Ron Paul  

"I don't like the income tax. Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of 'from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs'. That's socialism. It's written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him."

~ T. Coleman Andrews  

"From each according to his abilities,
to each according to his needs."

~ Karl Marx  

"Creation comes before distribution or there will be nothing to distribute.
The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary."

~ Ayn Rand  

"I never could believe that Providence
had sent a few men into the world,
ready booted and spurred to ride, and
millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden."

~ Richard Rumbold  

"Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way."

~ Will Durant  

"If ... our bureaucratic masters are becoming more akin to Soviet-style or Eastern European counterparts, it was rarely seen as a plus that those central schemers had wonderful intentions with their five-year plans. Such goals as 'job safety,' 'equality,' and freedom from 'discrimination,' depending on their definitions, may be good things for society, but they were never intended to be the business of the federal government."

~ William P. Hoar  

"Among the several cloudy appellatives
which have been commonly employed as cloaks for misgovernment,
there is none more conspicuous in this atmosphere of illusion
than the word 'Order'."

~ Jeremy Bentham  

"Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud.

But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations.

Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself."

~ Frederic Bastiat