Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force,
when practiced by an individual, is called crime.
When practiced by a government, it is called statism ..."

~ Nathaniel Branden  

"When a government controls both
the economic power of individuals
and the coercive power of the state ...
this violates a fundamental rule of happy living:
Never let the people with all the money and
the people with all the guns be the same people."

~ P. J. O'Rourke  

"We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure."

~ Ronald Reagan  

"To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right,
in peace and war, in council and in fight."

~ Homer  

"Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own."

~ James Madison  

"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely
according to conscience, above all liberties."

~ John Milton  

"How should it happen that the individual should be without rights,
but the combination of individuals should possess unlimited rights?"

~ Auberon Herbert  

"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests.  The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism."

~ Ayn Rand  

"Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"You can only protect your liberties in this world
by protecting the other man's freedom.
You can only be free if I am free."

~ Clarence S. Darrow  

"Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort
to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits
without necessarily sharing or accepting them."

~ Joshua Liebman  

"Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left
perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both
his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man
or order of men."

~ Adam Smith  

"Individuality is the aim of political liberty.
By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action
and of being as comports with order and the rights of others,
the institutions render him truly a free man.
He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner."

~ James Fenimore Cooper  

"The only freedom deserving the name,
is that of pursuing our own good in our own way,
so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs,
or impede their efforts to obtain it.
Each is the proper guardian of his own health,
whether bodily, or mental and spiritual.
Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other
to live as seems good to themselves,
than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."

~ John Stuart Mill  

"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."

~ Henry David Thoreau