Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"American [public] schools are failing because they are organized according to a bureaucratic, monopolistic model; their organizing principle is basically the same as that of a socialist economy."

~ David Boaz  

"Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them?
Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?"

~ Isabel Paterson  

"[P]ublic schooling often ends up to be little more
than majoritarian domination of minority viewpoints."

~ Robert B. Everhart  

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."

~ C. S. Lewis  

"Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic -- why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students."

~ Steve Dasbach  

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."

~ Theodore Roosevelt  

"In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.
     We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen -- of whom we have an ample supply.
     The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."

~ John D. Rockefeller, Sr.  

"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history.
It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood
and by teaching disrespect for home and parents...."

~ John Taylor Gatto  

"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges,
and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last
with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson  

"I have never met a more dedicated bunch of people than I did working in the union, at every level. The work is difficult and demanding, and very few people would do it if they didn’t believe in its righteousness. However, the conviction that you know what’s best insulates you against reflecting morally on your own actions and it teaches you to begin assessing morality in terms of either the ends justifying the means, or even worse, of mere good intention justifying those means."

~ Ben Johnson  

"[Trade licensing] almost inevitably becomes a tool in the hands of a special producer group to maintain a monopoly position at the expense of the rest of the public. There is no way to avoid this result."

~ Milton Friedman  

"The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them."

~ Milton Friedman  

"Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom.
They must tolerate opposition.
They must accept dissent from their dissent.
And they must give it the respect and
the latitude which they claim for themselves."

~ Abe Fortas  

"Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. Consequently those who live under the dominion of Puritanism become exceedingly desirous of power. Now love of power does far more harm than love of drink or any of the other vices against which Puritans protest. Of course, in virtuous people love of power camouflages itself as love of doing good, but this makes very little difference to its social effects. It merely means that we punish our victims for being wicked, instead of for being our enemies. In either case, tyranny and war result. Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda."

~ Bertrand Russell  

"The worst government is the most moral.
One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane.
But when the fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."

~ H. L. Mencken