Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Others -- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders -- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few -- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men -- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part ..."

~ Henry David Thoreau  

~ Margaret Thatcher  

"We are human and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds."

~ Novalis

"The persecuting spirit has its origin morally in the disposition of man to domineer over his fellow creatures; intellectually, in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct."

~ John Fiske  

"To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. The former adds to society. The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of taking it away, wealth gets destroyed. A monopolist who overcharges for his product takes money from those whom he is overcharging and at the same time destroys value. To get his monopoly price, he has to restrict production."

~ Joseph E. Stiglitz  

"People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We’ll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us."

~ Joseph Sobran  

"The theory of natural monopoly is an economic fiction. No such thing as a 'natural' monopoly has ever existed. The history of the so-called public utility concept is that the late 19th and early 20th-century 'utilities' competed vigorously, and like all other industries, they did not like competition. They first secured government-sanctioned monopolies, and then, with the help of a few influential economists, they constructed an ex post facto rationalization for their monopoly power. ... The theory of natural monopoly is a 19th-century economic fiction that defends 19th-century (or 18th-century, in the case of the U.S. Postal Service) monopolistic privileges and has no useful place in the 21st-century American economy."

~ Thomas J. DiLorenzo  

"Competition, free enterprise, and an open market
were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves
for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism."

~ Ralph Nader  

"Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against."

~ Samuel Webster  

"Monopoly favors the rich (on the whole) just as
competition (on the whole) favors the poor."

~ George Watson  

"[A]ny provider that commands 90 percent of the market -- whether we're talking about software, phone service, or heating oil -- is, by definition, a monopoly. Our government employs thousands of bureaucrats to track down and break up monopolies on the grounds that monopolies stifle competition and thereby produce bad products at high prices. Doesn't it strike anyone as strange that the same government protects its own monopoly in education? And stranger still, that nearly everyone accepts this state of affairs as normal -- as something that has always been and must always be? ... [C]ompetition forces public schools into making long-overdue repairs. And it offers poor parents the choices they desperately desire."

~ Jennifer A. Grossman  

"Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?"

~ Stephen Arons  

"The newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free but facts are sacred."

~ C. P. Scott  

"An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense,
nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken;
it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth,
or it is an error; it can never be a crime or a virtue."

~ Frances Wright  

"Liberty cannot be preserved
without a general knowledge among the people, who have...
a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right
to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge,
I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers."

~ John Adams