Libertarianism Quotes - Page 22

• In our government-controlled schools we are taught that Lincoln was our greatest president because his war ended slavery and saved the Union. As usual, the other side of the story - the side that reflects poorly on the government - somehow gets lost.

  Richard J. Maybury

  War, School, Government

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• The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their Nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Agreement, Names, People

  Alexis de Tocqueville (1847). “Democracy in America”, p.419

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• Government should stay the hell out of people's business.

  Barry Goldwater

  Government, People, Liberty

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• Politicians, like bombers, seldom see their victims.

  Donald J. Boudreaux

  Liberty, Bombers, Libertarian

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• There's no greater service to this country than the defense of its freedom.

  Barry Goldwater

  Country, Liberty, Defense

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• Americans have the mistaken viewpoint that Lady Liberty is only a peacetime luxury who is ill-equipped to fight the nasties. Therefore, they reason, we need an equally nasty Big Brother. Americans have forgotten that Lady Liberty is one ferocious mother when protecting her children.

  Mary Ruwart

  Mother, Brother, Children

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• A caged canary is safe but not free.

  Walter E. Williams

  Liberty, Safe, Libertarian

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• Public Schools too often fail because they are shielded from the very force that improves performance and sparks innovation in nearly every other human enterprise - competition.

  Bob Lutz

  School, Competition, Innovation

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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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• 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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• Painful as it may be to hear it, there's nothing special about the people of this country that sets them apart from the other people of the world. It is the Bill of Rights, and only the Bill of Rights, that keeps us from becoming the world's biggest banana republic. The moment we forget that, the American Dream is over.

  Alexander Beresford Hope

  Dream, Country, Rights

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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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• There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.

  Thomas Sowell

  Political, Liberty, Libertarian

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• The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means.

  Henry Grady Weaver

  Mean, Views, Agony

  Henry Grady Weaver (2016). “The Mainspring of Human Progress [Revised Edition]”, p.38, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.

  Milton Friedman

  Liberty, Doe, Libertarian

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• The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the "best" sources.

  Walter Karp

  Powerful, Liberty, Libertarian

  Walter Karp (1992). “Buried alive: essays on our endangered republic”, Franklin Square Pr

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• Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principle moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Names, Interesting, Political

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• To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Sex, Party, Brain

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• How ever sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, religion or all four.

  Gloria Steinem

  Sex, Race, Liberty

  Gloria Steinem (1986). “Outrageous acts and everyday rebellions”, New Amer Library

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• Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine.

  Victor C. Ferkiss

  Struggle, Mean, Loss

  Victor C. Ferkiss (1969). “Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality”

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• In levying taxes and in shearing sheep, it is well to stop when you get down to the skin.

  Austin O'Malley

  Sheep, Liberty, Skins

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