Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"For this future emancipation, we have to rule out ideologies that aim at reinforcing the state, the police and controls in general, and at reducing liberty."

~ André Thirion  

"[A] deep-rooted culture of incompetence and corruption has made it virtually impossible for government to function fairly and efficiently. And because most government employees are shielded by layers of protection, they couldn't care less. Never before in the history of this nation has there been a greater divide between a self-serving federal leviathan and millions of Americans... 'Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,' Ronald Reagan reminded us during his inaugural address in 1981. Nothing's changed since then, with one exception: It's gotten far worse."

~ Arnold Ahlert  

"The tragedy of the police state is that it always regards all opposition as a crime, and there are no degrees."

~ Robert Gilbert Vansittart  

"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence."

~ Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi  

"But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."

~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.  

"War is the health of the State."

~ Randolph Bourne  

"No man's life, liberty or property are safe
while the legislature is in session."

~ Judge Gideon J. Tucker  

"The crucial distinction between systems...was no longer ideological.  The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state."

~ Christopher Hitchens  

"The misapprehension springs from the fact that the learned jurists, deceiving themselves as well as others, depict in their books an ideal of government -- not as it really is, an assembly of men who oppress their fellow-citizens, but in accordance with the scientific postulate, as a body of men who act as the representatives of the rest of the nation. They have gone on repeating this to others so long that they have ended by believing it themselves, and they really seem to think that justice is one of the duties of governments. History, however, shows us that governments, as seen from the reign of Caesar to those of the two Napoleons and Prince Bismarck, are in their very essence a violation of justice; a man or a body of men having at command an army of trained soldiers, deluded creatures who are ready for any violence, and through whose agency they govern the State, will have no keen sense of the obligation of justice. Therefore governments will never consent to diminish the number of those well-trained and submissive servants, who constitute their power and influence."

~ Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi  

"We should not expect the state to appear in the guise
of an extravagant good fairy at every christening,
a loquacious companion at every stage of life's journey,
and the unknown mourner at every funeral."

~ Margaret Thatcher  

"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."

~ Justice Millard Fillmore Caldwell  

"The task of weaning various people and groups
from the national nipple will not be easy.
The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will
fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice."

~ Linda Bowles  

"Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure."

~ Anthony de Jasay  

"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that
they may be more docile instruments in its hands --
even for beneficial purposes -- will find that
with small men no great thing can really be accomplished."

~ John Stuart Mill  

"The statist objective, always, is to make as many persons as possible, as dependent as possible, on a government as big as possible."

~ Robert W. Lee