Liberalism Quotes - Page 10

• The whole Jeffersonian ideal was that people are temporarily in government. Government is not the basic reality. People are. The private sector. And government is just a limited power to make things go better.

  Jerry Brown

  Wisdom, Reality, Government

  Jerry Brown (1976). “Thoughts”

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• We gain nothing by trading the tyranny of capital for the tyranny of labor.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Wisdom, Politics, Gains

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• And these great natural rights may be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property; because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man's natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense.

  William Blackstone

  Wisdom, Men, Rights

  Sir William BLACKSTONE, Samuel Warren (1856). “Blackstone's Commentaries systematically abridged and adapted to the existing state of the law and constitution, with great additions. By Samuel Warren”, p.101

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• In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Doctrine

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• One man in one mood will attack Industrial Capitalism for its destruction of beauty; another for its incompetence; another for the vileness of the men who chiefly prosper under it; another for its mere confusion and noise; another for its false values; it was until recently most fiercely attacked for its impoverishment of the workers, its margin of unemployment and the rest - indeed so fiercely that it was compelled to seek palliatives for the evil. With a mass of men it was attacked from a vague but strong sense of injustice; it allowed a few rich to exploit mankind.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Strong, Men, Evil

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• We may not say to the poor: "You have a right to fight the rich merely because they are rich and in order to make yourselves less poor." We may say: "You have a right to fight to prevent the conditions of your life becoming inhuman," but we may not say, "You have a right to fight merely because you desire to have more and your opponent to have less."

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Fighting, Order

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• The terror in which English capitalists now stand of organized proletarian resistance gives to the naturally protected craft organizations the power to receive the wages they demand. They act as they have been trained to act by capitalist society, which denies the doctrine of the Just Price, which proclaims work to be an evil and the goal of human endeavor to be the avoidance of it; which puts it up as an ideal that individuals should get as much money as they possibly can out of their fellows by any means in their power.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Mean, Organization

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• Wherever the Industrial system has reached its second generation it is threatened by two mortal perils. The first is the demand by an organized proletariat for sustenance without relation to the product of its labor; a demand which threatens the very existence of PROFIT (on the necessary presumption of which Capitalism reposes). The second, and immediately graver danger is that of a revolt for the confiscation of the means of production.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Mean, Two

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• If there must always be a laboring population distinct from proprietors and employers, we regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages.

  Orestes Brownson

  Wisdom, Population, Wages

  Richard M. Reinsch, II, Orestes Augustus Brownson (2016). “Seeking the Truth: An Orestes Brownson Anthology”, p.170, CUA Press

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• Wages is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holders.

  Orestes Brownson

  Wisdom, Devil, Wages

  Richard M. Reinsch, II, Orestes Augustus Brownson (2016). “Seeking the Truth: An Orestes Brownson Anthology”, p.171, CUA Press

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• The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. It has been chosen not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and Rome, but to accomplish a greater work than was assigned to either. In art, it will prove false to its mission if it do not rival Greece; and in science and philosophy, if it do not surpass it. In the State, in law, in jurisprudence, it must continue and surpass Rome.

  Orestes Brownson

  Art, Philosophy, Ideas

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• The tendency everywhere in America to concentrate power and responsibility in one man is unmistakable.

  James Bryce

  Wisdom, Responsibility, Men

  James Bryce (1889). “The American Commonwealth”

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• We cannot make owners by merely giving men something to own. And, I repeat, whether there be sufficient desire for property left upon which we can work, only experience can decide.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Giving

  Hilaire Belloc (2002). “An Essay on the Restoration of Property”, p.29, IHS Press

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• Louis Kelso of San Francisco, a lawyer-economist, has for years felt that he has a radical answer to the problem.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Years, San Francisco, Answers

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• The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.

  Edmund Burke

  Wisdom, Interesting, Politics

  Edmund Burke (2014). “Revolutionary Writings: Reflections on the Revolution in France and the First Letter on a Regicide Peace”, p.52, Cambridge University Press

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• But now that foreign steel, and foreign cars, are moving into the United States in increased quantities at relatively low prices, the United States can no longer keep its business system fluid by inflation.

  John Chamberlain

  Wisdom, Moving, Car

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• Thus a new way of finding fluidity will inevitably be imposed on management and labor alike. The profit-sharing, or "progress" sharing union contract is the only possible way of satisfying labor and the consumer without saddling industry with fixed costs that in depression periods can kill off marginal companies like flies.

  John Chamberlain

  Wisdom, Progress, Cost

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• The broad rich acres of our agricultural plains have been long preserved by nature to become her untrammeled gift to a people civilized and free, upon which should rest, in well-distributed ownership, the numerous homes of enlightened, equal, and fraternal citizens... Nor should our vast tracts of so-called desert lands be yielded up to the monopoly of corporations or grasping individuals, as appears to be much the tendency under the existing statute.

  Grover Cleveland

  Home, Land, People

  Grover Cleveland's Fourth Annual Message (December 1888), published in "The writings and speeches of Grover Cleveland" edited by George Frederick Parker, circa 1892.

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• Capitalism had arisen through the misuse and exaggeration of certain rights, notably the right of property - the basis of economic freedom - and the right of contract, which is one of the main functions of economic freedom. Therefore, even under Capitalism, so long as the old principles were remembered it was possible to recall the principles whereby Society had once been sane and well ordered.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Rights, Long, Principles

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• But though Usury is in itself immoral, and justly condemned by every ethical code, its chief and worst defect in the particular case we are now examining, the growth of Capitalism and its increasing proletariat, is the centralization of irresponsible control over the lives of men: the putting power over the proletariat into the hands of a few who can direct the loans of currency and credit without which that proletariat could not be fed and clothed and maintained in work.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Hands

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.96, TAN Books

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• I cannot help but think it perilous to suffer these lands or the sources of their irrigation to fall into the hands of monopolies, which by such means may exercise lordship over the areas dependent on their treatment for productiveness.

  Grover Cleveland

  Fall, Mean, Exercise

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• Political rule is so natural and necessary to the human race that it cannot be withdrawn without destroying nature itself; for the nature of man is such that he is a social animal.

  Robert Bellarmine

  Wisdom, Animal, Men

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• It depends on the consent of the people to decide whether kings or consuls or other magistrates are to be established in authority over them, and if there is legitimate cause, the people can change a kingdom into an aristocracy, or an aristocracy into a democracy, and vice versa, as we read was done in Rome.

  Robert Bellarmine

  Wisdom, Kings, Rome

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• But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. The process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Running, Responsibility, Order

  Frederic Bastiat (2006). “The Law”, p.3, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life - physical, intellectual, and moral life.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Wisdom, Intellectual, Politics

  Frederic Bastiat (2006). “The Law”, p.3, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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