Liberty Quotes - Page 15

• There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.

  Christopher Morley

  Inspirational, Life, Positive

  CHRISTOPHER MORLEY (1922). “WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS”

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• To be governed ... is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated, numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, law-driven, preached at, spied upon, censured, checked, valued, enrolled - by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Law, Libertarian, Virtue

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• The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.

  Milton Friedman

  Letting Go, Weed, Loss

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• The fact throughout history is that whenever government dominates the economic affairs of its citizenry, a free society is eroded, then destroyed, and a minority government ensues. Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.

  William E. Simon

  Government, Minorities, Libertarian

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• The greatest productive force is human selfishness.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Selfishness, Libertarian, Economics

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Time Enough for Love”, p.325, Penguin

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• Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

  James Madison

  Fear, War, Enemy

  James Madison, Ralph Ketcham “Selected Writings of James Madison”, Hackett Publishing

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• No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

  Edmund Burke

  Inspirational, Motivational, Success

  'On the Sublime and Beautiful' (1757) pt. 2, sect. 2

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• We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Inspiring, Women, 4th Of July

  Declaration of Sentiments, First Woman's Rights

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• Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

  James Madison

  Freedom, Democracies Have, Rights

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (1842). “The Federalist, on the New Constitution, Written in the Year 1788”, p.46

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• Good intentions will always be pleaded, for every assumption of power; but they cannot justify it ... It is hardly too strong to say, that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intention, real or pretended.

  Daniel Webster

  Strong, Real, Gun

  Daniel Webster (1854). “The speeches of Daniel Webster and his master-pieces”, p.282

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• There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Libertarian, Basic Human Rights, Damn

  "The Liberty Manifesto". Speech delivered for the opening of the Cato Institute's headquarters in Washington, D.C., May 6, 1993.

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• The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.

  Milton Friedman

  Philosophy, Organization, Greed

  Milton Friedman (1968). “Bright Promises, Dismal Performance: An Economist's Protest”, San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

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• The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.

  Tacitus

  Peace, Freedom, War

  "Annals". Book by Tacitus, Book III, 27,

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• The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

  Ayn Rand

  Freedom, Men, Libertarian

  Ayn Rand (1999). “Ayn Rand Reader”, p.380, Penguin

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• Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!

  Samuel Adams

  Gun, Hands, Security And Freedom

  Samuel Adams' Speech delivered at the State House in Philadelphia, Philadelphia, August 1, 1776.

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• Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

  Edmund Burke

  Society, Appetite, Virtuous

  Edmund Burke (1791). “A Letter from Mr. Burke, to a Member of the National Assembly: In Answer to Some Objections to His Book on French Affairs”, p.69

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• The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.

  Frederick Douglass

  Freedom, Democracies Have, Tyrants

  Frederick Douglass, Philip Sheldon Foner, Yuval Taylor (1999). “Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings”, p.367, Chicago Review Press

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• Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Men, Law, Politics

  Frederic Bastiat (2006). “The Law”, p.6, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Education, Wisdom, People

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of T. Jefferson”

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• Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

  Milton Friedman

  Government, Libertarian, Conservative

  Quoted in Cleveland Plain Dealer, 27 Oct. 1993

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• Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Arbitrary, Libertarian

  "Minority Report".

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• Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

  Mark Twain

  Funny, Life, Sarcastic

  Quoted in Albert B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (1912)

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• It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

  James F. Cooper

  Freedom, Men, Democracies Have

  "The American Democrat: Or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America". Book by James Fenimore Cooper, 1838.

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  The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Strength, Wisdom, Veterans Day

  Letter to William Stephens Smith, 13 Nov. 1787

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• A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Wise, Wisdom, Men

  Thomas Jefferson (2011). “Jefferson on Freedom: Wisdom, Advice, and Hints on Freedom, Democracy, and the American Way”, p.65, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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