Libertarian Quotes - Page 34

• A caged canary is safe but not free.

  Walter E. Williams

  Liberty, Safe, Canaries

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• The American people are becoming more and more afraid of, and are running away from, their own revolution.

  Leonard Read

  Running, People, Liberty

  Leonard E. Read (1990). “The freedom philosophy”, Foundation for Economic Education

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• The beneficial effect of state intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak, visible, while its evil effects are gradual and indirect and lay out of sight ... Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favor upon governmental intervention.

  A. V. Dicey

  Sight, Evil, Liberty

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• There is nothing new in state interventionism. It is as old and reactionary as societal organization itself. Always, when it permeates the body politic, it kills the nation.

  Spruille Braden

  Organization, Liberty, Body

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• It seems that wherever the Welfare State is involved, the moral precept, "Thou shalt not steal," becomes altered to say: "Thou shalt not steal, except for what thou deemest to be a worthy cause, where thou thinkest that thou canst use the loot for a better purpose than wouldst the victim of the theft."

  F. A. Harper

  Liberty, Purpose, Use

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• The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society. Historians know that both phenomena were especially marked in the declining eras of the Roman Empire in the West and of its successor state, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire.

  William Henry Chamberlin

  Liberty, Population, Byzantine

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• Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Government, Self, Hands

  Henry Hazlitt, Hans F. Sennholz (1993). “The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt”, Foundation for Economic Education

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• According to the Tax Foundation, taxes now consume more than 38% of the average family's budget. That is more than is spent on food, clothing, housing, and transportation combined. Compare this to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor one-third of their output - and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us?

  Daniel J. Mitchell

  Average, Giving, Liberty

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• Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.

  Henry Hyde

  Hate, Liberty, Speech

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• No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than any [constitutional] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.

  Roger Brooke Taney

  Men, Liberty, Doctrine

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• Tax reform means, "Don't tax you, don't tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree."

  Russell B. Long

  Humorous, Mean, Tree

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• Whenever there is some trouble in any area of the economy, the simplest solution to many people is "Let the government fix it." Yet ... every time the government uses its money or its power to favor this group or that ... the net result is such a web of supports, subsidies, interventions and controls that it is almost impossible for a nation to find its way back into a dynamic system of really free enterprise.

  Lawrence Fertig

  Government, People, Support

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• If 50 million people say a stupid thing, it's still a stupid thing.

  David Severn

  Stupid, People, Liberty

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• ... the American Colonists under King George III had it pretty good compared to us. They would wonder why we haven't taken up arms and seceded yet.

  Lewis Goldberg

  Kings, Taken, Liberty

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• Not in government or force, not in slavery or war, but in the creative, and thereby spiritual, power of freedom, shall our inspiration be found.

  F. A. Harper

  Spiritual, War, Inspiration

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• Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

  Arthur Schnitzler

  Death, Dying, Liberty

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• Government is, at every level, a means to gather in the labor and wealth of the people, and then instruct the people about new restrictions or monitoring of their lives.

  Jeff Baxter

  Mean, Government, People

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• All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.

  Walter Wriston

  Law, Judging, Liberty

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• A country that goes out of its way to imprison the innocent has no business preaching democracy to the world.

  Paul Craig Roberts

  Country, Democracy, Liberty

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• How to obtain freedom has been, and is, mankind's most important quest.

  John Pugsley

  Important, Liberty, Quests

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• All of political history history can be summed up as a struggle to throw the bad guys out and put the good guys in.

  John Pugsley

  Struggle, Guy, Political

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• Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. I'm a bad guy; I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins.

  Sammy Gravano

  Gun, Winning, Safety

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• If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Book, Land, Media Control

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1941). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1938, Volume 7”, p.418, Best Books on

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• The average American family head will be forced to do twenty years' labor to pay taxes in his or her lifetime.

  James Bovard

  Average, Years, Liberty

  James Bovard (1995). “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty”, p.289, Palgrave Macmillan

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• I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds ... I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.

  Grover Cleveland

  Indulge In, Liberty, Approval

  Grover Cleveland (1968). “Grover Cleveland, 1837-1908: Chronology, Documents, Bibliographical Aids”

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