Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would ... assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it."

~ Adam Smith  

"Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn."

~ C. S. Lewis  

"It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted, especially in France. This is greatly due to a fatal desire -- learned from the teachings of antiquity -- that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. There is no country in the world where so many provisions are established for them; so many hospitals to receive them when they are sick or lame, founded and maintained by voluntary charities; so many alms-houses for the aged of both sexes, together with a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor. Under all these obligations, are our poor modest, humble, and thankful; and do they use their best endeavours to maintain themselves, and lighten our shoulders of this burthen? — On the contrary, I affirm that there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent. The day you passed that act, you took away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependance on somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health, for support in age or sickness. In short, you offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty."

~ Benjamin Franklin  

"As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods."

~ Joseph Paul Goebbels  

"While the State exists, there can be no freedom.
When there is freedom there will be no State."

~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin  

"Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity."

~ William Howard Taft  

"Socialism in America will come through the ballot box."

~ Gus Hall  

"The government of the world was [Cecil] Rhodes' simple desire."

~ Sarah Gertrude Millin  

"The only path to the final defeat of imperialism
and the building of socialism is revolutionary war."

~ Bill Ayers  

"I claim for the nation an education that depends only on the State, because children of the State must be raised by members of the State."

~ Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais  

"What gives the new despotism its peculiar effectiveness
is indeed its liaison with humanitarianism,
but beyond this fact its capacity for entering
into the smallest details of human life."

~ Robert Nisbet  

"It would be the greatest mistake, certainly,
to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind.
Concessions are nothing but a new form of war."

~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin