Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"An equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"All men have equal rights to liberty,
to their property, and to the protection of the laws."

~ Voltaire  

"From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently.  Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race."

~ Justice Clarence Thomas  

"No man has a natural right to commit aggression
on the equal rights of another, and
this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"Every individual of the community at large
has an equal right to the protection of government."

~ Alexander Hamilton  

"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly
to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when
all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."

~ Aristotle  

"All men have equal rights, but not to equal things."

~ Edmund Burke  

"Make no mistake about it -- and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society.  Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the benefit it brings to the poor.  All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not its goal, purpose or moral justification.  The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man -- every man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone's need."

~ Ayn Rand  

"Uniformity, therefore, is an essential built-in element of utopian existence, and it is no less important that this uniformity remain permanent."

~ Thomas Molnar  

"Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way."

~ Will Durant  

"The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings."

~ Judge Robert Bork

"The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute."

~ J. William Fulbright  

"I do not trust my eyes to tell me what a man is: I have a better and more trustworthy light by which I can distinguish what is true from what is false: let the mind find out what is good for the mind."

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca