Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Slavery, or an absolute and unlimited power in the master over the life and fortune of the slave, is unauthorized by the common law. Indeed, it is repugnant to the principles of natural law, that such a state should subsist in any social system. The reasons which we sometimes see assigned for the origin and the continuance of slavery appear, when examined to the bottom, to be built upon a false foundation. In the enjoyment of their persons and of their property, the common law protects all."

~ James Wilson  

"The men who administer public affairs must first of all see that everyone holds onto what is his, and that private men are never deprived of their goods by public men."

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero  

"You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?' "

~ Neal Boortz  

"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."

~ John Adams  

"Absolute, arbitrary power over the lives, liberty and property of freemen exists nowhere in a republic, not even in the largest majority."

~ Kentucky Declaration of Rights - Art. I, Sec. 2  

"By the power to lay and collect imposts Congress may impose duties on any or every article of commerce imported into these states to what amount they please. By the power to lay excises, a power very odious in its nature, since it authorizes officers to examine into your private concerns, the Congress may impose duties on every article of use or consumption: On the food that we eat, on the liquors we drink, on the clothes that we wear, the glass which enlighten our houses, or the hearths necessary for our warmth and comfort. By the power to lay and collect taxes, they may proceed to direct taxation on every individual either by a capitation tax on their heads or an assessment on their property. By this part of the section, therefore, the government has a power to tax to what amount they choose and thus to sluice the people at every vein as long as they have a drop of blood left."

~ Luther Martin  

"Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only
if he is free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents,
free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security
of his old age and his family."

~ Herbert Hoover  

"[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people’s lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became."

~ Jacob G. Hornberger  

"Welfare rights are pseudo-rights: They rely on the force of law to take private property for the use of others without compensation and without consent. Public charity is forced charity; it is not a virtue but a vice."

~ James A. Dorn  

Government is instituted to protect property of every sort. ...
This being the end of government, that alone is a just government,
which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.

~ James Madison  

"[Tyrannical] power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?"

~ Alexis de Tocqueville  

"Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction
until the state is indifferent to every form
of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism."

~ Harold J. Laski  

"God requireth not a uniformity of religion."

~ Roger Williams  

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

~ Viktor Frankl