Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Collectivism is the political theory that states that the will of the people is omnipotent, an individual must obey; that society as a whole, not the individual, is the unit of moral value. ... Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics."

~ Andrew Bernstein  

"When government will expropriate any wealth that people create, the present value of future output can actually be less than the value of the country's tangible resources. The power of predatory government to destroy wealth is truly awesome."

~ Arnold Kling  

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."

~ Gustave Le Bon  

"During a war, news should be given out
for instruction rather than information."

~ Joseph Paul Goebbels  

"How many crimes are permitted simply because
their authors could not endure being wrong."

~ Albert Camus  

"History is an account mostly false,
of events mostly unimportant,
which are brought about by rulers,
mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."

~ Ambrose Bierce  

"Sometimes, when leading families or merchants organized a government for their city, they not only provided for some power sharing through voting but took pains to reduce the probability that the government's chief executive could assume autocratic power. For a time in Genoa, for example, the chief administrator of the government had to be an outsider -- and thus someone with no membership in any of the powerful families in the city. Moreover, he was constrained to a fixed term of office, forced to leave the city after the end of his term, and forbidden from marrying into any of the local families. In Venice, after a doge who attempted to make himself autocrat was beheaded for his offense, subsequent doges were followed in official processions by a sword-bearing symbolic executioner as a reminder of the punishment intended for any leader who attempted to assume dictatorial power."

~ Mancur Olson  

"Goodness without wisdom always accomplished evil."

~ Robert A. Heinlein  

"None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election,
the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we
can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours.
The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller."

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay  

"Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. "

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"Nothing is less productive
than to make more efficient
what should not be done at all."

~ Peter Drucker  

"Always remember the difference between economic power and political power: You can refuse to hire someone's services or buy his products in the private sector and go somewhere else instead. In the public sector, though, if you refuse to accept a politician's or bureaucrat's product or services you go to jail. Ultimately, after all, all regulations are observed and all taxes are paid at gunpoint. I believe those few who can't even see that have been short-sighted sheep, and I suggest they learn how to think conceptually, develop consistency and grasp principles soon."

~ Rick Gaber  

"He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands
the power to decide at each step, the course of his life,
and who lives in a society which does not block
the exercise of that power."

~ Salvador De Madariaga