Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive."

~ Ayn Rand  

"If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?"

~ Robert Anton Wilson  

"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."

~ Robert A. Heinlein  

"When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for."

~ John Milton  

" ... I suggest that the more the state intervenes in such situations, the more 'necessary' (on this view) it becomes, because positive altruism and voluntary cooperative behaviour atrophy in the presence of the state and grow in its absence. Thus, again, the state exacerbates the conditions which are supposed to make it necessary. We might say that the state is like an addictive drug: the more of it we have, the more we 'need' it and the more we come to 'depend' on it."

~ Michael Taylor  

"The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson  

"Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts."

~ Khalil Gibran  

"It is important therefore that in these schools the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated, and habits of subordination and obedience formed. One of the greatest blessings which the State can confer upon her children is to instill into their minds at an early period moral and religious truths. ... Thousands of unfortunate children are growing up in perfect ignorance of their moral and religious duties. Their parents equally unfortunate know not how to instruct them, and have not the opportunity or ability of placing them under the care of those who could give them instruction. The State, in the warmth of her affection and solicitude for their welfare, must take charge of those children and place them in schools where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts can be trained to virtue."

~ Archibald D. Murphey  

"Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can."

~ Jonathan Swift  

"A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues... is on the way to totalitarianism and death."

~ Robert M. Hutchins  

"If the political-correctness fascists get their way, we can safely assume it will be correct-thinking, "political cleansing" squads deciding what we can or cannot say on the Intenet. These people fear public debate and demand homogenization of "acceptable" attitudes compatible with their emotional, utopian idealism."

~ Charles W. Moore  

"You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion."

~ Garrison Keillor  

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

~ Adam Smith  

"It is collectivism that is the unrealistic expression of utopian belief systems.  In its worst form -- the state -- collectivism is the institutionalized exertion of violence to compel living beings to behave contrary to their natural self-interest inclinations.  So strong are the motivations for individual preferences that the state must resort to attacks upon the very nature of life to satisfy the ambitions of those who see others as nothing more than resources to be exploited for such ends."

~ Butler D. Shaffer