A Few Good Quotes

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. - Frédéric Bastiat

"Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or an an inconvenience to the society? The answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged." Adam Simth, The Wealth of Nations

All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions. - John Locke

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. – Milton Friedman

‎"A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort … is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence." – Ayn Rand

When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world. Such a truth is woman's right to equal liberty with man. --Frederick Douglass

Collectivism doesn't work because it's based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person's fair share of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless. – P. J. O'Rourke

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. --Thomas Jefferson

We should champion the free market as a system where productivity allows people to be artists, record store clerks, or even bums. We can personally praise or chastise anyone for their life-choices and values, but we should not argue that the market is there to do it for us. - Trevor Burrus

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes. --Thomas Paine

To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind. --Adam Smith

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins. --H. L. Mencken

The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people. --John Stuart Mill

The safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed. --James Madison

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it. --John Stuart Mill

The rule of the many by the few we call tyranny; the rule of the few by the many is tyranny also, only of a less intense kind. --Herbert Spencer

"Whenever you see a law, your first suspicion should be that that law is on the books because somebody would naturally behave differently than the law specifies." - Walter E. Williams

The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security. --Thomas Paine

The Communist hope of economic equality in the Soviet Union rests now on the death of all the men and women who are individuals. A new generation, they tell me, had already been so shaped and schooled that a human mass is actually being created; millions of young men and women do, in veritable fact, have the psychology of the bee-swarm, the ant-hill. --Rose Wilder Lane

The bad workmen, who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry, are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good. --John Stuart Mill

"Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms. ... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent." -Alexis de Tocqueville

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." - Thomas Jefferson

"Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people; The People is a fiction, like The State. You cannot get a Will of the Mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic...the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills." - Rose Wilder Lane

"Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is of right, absolute." - John Stuart Mill

"For if one holds the moralized conception of liberty, then liberty is defined not as freedom from interference per se but merely as freedom from interference with what one has a right to do. If one then says that we have the right to self-ownership, and private property, etc., because those rights protect liberty, then one has argued oneself right into a circle."

Most of the energy devoted to political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government. --Milton Friedman

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions... Liberty and responsibility are inseparable. --F. A. Hayek

"Let men learn that a legislature is not 'our God upon earth,' though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed." - Herbert Spencer

"Let the influx of money be ever so great, if there be no confidence, property will sink in value... The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money." - James Madison

"It is not the policy of the government in America to give aid to works of any kind. They let things take their natural course without help or impediment, which is generally the best policy." - Thomas Jefferson

"In democracies, nothing is more great or brilliant than commerce; it attracts the attention of the public, and fills the imagination of the multitude. All passions of energy are directed toward it." - Alexis de Tocqueville

In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves. --John Stuart Mill

If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making? --Herbert Spencer

"If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption." - Thomas Jefferson

"I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others." - Thomas Jefferson

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." - Thomas Jefferson

"Freedom of thought and the right to private judgment, in matters of conscience, driven from every corner of the earth, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. Let us cherish the noble guests, and shelter them under the wings of universal toleration." - Samuel Adams

For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. --H. L. Mencken

Economic compulsion is, therefore, constantly threatened by human willfulness. It must constantly overcome that willfulness, crush all impulses of egotism and independence, destroy variety of human desires and behavior. --Rose Wilder Lane

"Few enjoyments are given us from the open and liberal hand of nature; but by art, labor and industry we can extract them in great abundance. Hence the ideas of property become necessary in all civil society." - David Hume

Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom; socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. --Alexis de Tocqueville

"Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government." - Thomas Paine