Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Government is like fire.
If it is kept within bounds and
under the control of the people,
it contributes to the welfare of all.
But if it gets out of place,
if it gets too big and out of control,
it destroys the happiness
and even the lives of the people."

~ Harold E. Stassen  

"True liberty can exist only when justice is equally administered to all."

~ Katherine Mansfield  

"I think they've [Labour Government] made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people. "

~ Margaret Thatcher  

"All political theories assume, of course,
that most individuals are very ignorant.
Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest
in that they include among the ignorant
themselves as well as the wisest."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"If you see a man approaching you
with the obvious intent of doing you good,
you should run for your life."

~ Henry David Thoreau  

"It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve."

~ Henry George  

"Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do
what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce
their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are
the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny."

~ Barry Goldwater  

"Men must have the right of choice,
even to choose wrong,
if he shall ever learn to choose right."

~ Josiah C. Wedgwood  

"A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity -- as liberals do.
A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population -- as liberals do.
And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and overtaxes the nation’s citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state -- as liberals do."

~ Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.  

"Liberty is not collective, it is personal.
All liberty is individual liberty."

~ Calvin Coolidge  

"Democracy and liberty are not the same.
Democracy is little more than mob rule,
while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual."

~ Walter E. Williams  

"Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life
to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ...
as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified,
bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from
the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural
strengths and abilities?"

~ Sergei Hoff  

"...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of
history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress,
and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification.
For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas
it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas.
And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or
imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption."

~ B. H. Liddell Hart  

"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself."

~ Henry Brooks Adams  

"Liberty, whether natural, civil, or political, is the lawful power in the individual to exercise his corresponding rights. It is greatly favored in law."

~ Henry Campbell Black