Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'."

~ Stephen Cox  

"Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. ... Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral. Since there are no divine rights anymore, this concept must therefore disappear completely as related only to the preliminary regime and totally inconsistent with the final state where there are only duties based on functions."

~ Auguste Comte  

"The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact
that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization,
often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'."

~ James C. Scott  

"Apologists for activist government never tire of telling us that the benevolent state is our protector and that without it we'd be at the mercy of monsters. It is about time that we understood that the U.S. government does more to endanger the American people than any imagined monsters around the world…by pursuing its Grand Foreign Policy of meddling anywhere and everywhere."

~ Sheldon Richman  

~ Aldous Huxley  

"We've been asleep for about 50 years.
Ever since the end of World War II
we just steadily handed our future and
our bank accounts and now our children,
handed them all over to the federal government..."

~ Michael Moriarty  

"[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state -- what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations -- what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force."

~ Edward H. Crane  

"The [classical] liberal, of course,
does not deny that there are some superior people --
he is not an egalitarian --
but he denies that anyone has authority
to decide who these superior people are."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

~ Mark Skousen  

"Statism – the subordination of the individual to the state -
leads inevitably to the most hideous oppression."

~ Andrew Bernstein  

"Socialism is but Catholicism addressing itself
not to the soul but to the sense of men...
[Both implore you to] accept authority,
accept the force which it employs,
resign yourself to all-powerful managers,
give up the free choice and the free act...
They both seek to sacrifice man."

~ Auberon Herbert  

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"Not surprisingly, the federal judiciary nearly always rules in favor of the federal government. Judicial review, contrary to the assurances of its advocates, has hardly restrained Congress at all. Instead it has progressively stripped the states of their traditional powers, while allowing federal power to grow unchecked."

~ Joseph Sobran  

"Fascist intellectuals, such as Ugo Spirito, made the round of conferences preaching the virtues of postcapitalism fascism and in fact tried to nudge the structure in a 'leftist' direction by calling for more collective control and even corporative ownership of the economy. Mussolini looked abroad to find that Franklin Roosevelt was merely seeking to emulate Italy's innovations."

~ Charles S. Maier  

"I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality,
however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation."

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt