c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
— Gideon J. (Gideon John) Tucker
It is not in our forming battlements or bristling seacoasts, or our Army and Navy that makes America great - but rather our reliance in the law of liberty and the religious law God has planted in us.
— Abraham Lincoln
We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home
—  nor shall her chosen altar be neglected.
Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Liberty isn't bestowed
—  it's achieved. It is not a gift
Equality, as understood by the American Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law. Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect. Otherwise, inequality is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in all his human characteristics. Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both engines of liberty.
— Mark R. Levin, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America
Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.
— Abraham Lincoln
[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.
— John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
This is so whether the said body of citizens or its prevailing part does this directly of itself, or commits the task to another or others who are not and cannot be the legislator in an unqualified sense but only in a certain respect and at a certain time and in accordance with the authority of the primary legislator. And in consequence of this I say that laws and anything else instituted by election must receive their necessary approval from the same primary authority and no other: whatever may be the situation concerning various ceremonies or solemnities, which are not required for the results of an election to stand but for their good standing, and even without which the election would be no less valid. I say further that it is by the same authority that laws and anything else instituted by election must receive any addition or subtraction or even total overhaul, any interpretation and any suspension: depending on the demands of time and place and other circumstances that might make one of these measures opportune for the sake of the common advantage in such matters.
— Marsiglio of Padua, The Defender of the Peace
...We don't defeat our enemy by giving him a platform to spread the very propaganda they hope will defeat you... You can only have freedom and liberty when others want that for you. When the other side only uses freedom with the hopes of destroying it later once their in charge, it's time to shut them down... They will use our Constitution as long as they need to until they get the power, then watch them trash it.
— G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
State can become threat to individual life, cause of individual liberty.
— Kaushik
The only freedom that deserves a name is that of pursuing our on good, in our own way, so long as we do not deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it ...
— J.S. Mills
The Awakening Land" p614 But what in God's name did folks today want to make the whole world over like they were for? In her time in the woods, everybody she knew was egged on to be his own special self. He could live and think like he wanted to and no two humans you met up with were alike. Each had his own particular beliefs and his reasons for owning to them. Folks were a joy to talk to then, for all were different. Even the simple-minded were original in their own notions. They either mad you laugh or gave you pause. But folks in Americus today seemed mighty tiresome and getting more so. If you saw one, you saw most. If you heard one talk, it's likely you heard the rest. They were creacked on living like everybody else, according to the fashion, and if you were so queer and outlandish as to go your own way and do what you liked, it bothered their 'narve strings' so they were liable to lock you up in one of their newfangled asylums or take you home where they could hold you down to their way of doing...
— Conrad Richter
People, imperfect and corruptible are society's building blocks. Political theories evading this reality are a catastrophe in waiting.
— A.E. Samaan
If collectivizing highly personal medical decisions is evil, then so follows that collectivized medicine is evil.
— A.E. Samaan, H.H. Laughlin: American Scientist, American Progressive, Nazi Collaborator
A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century
— Charles de Montesquieu
There were those few, and there will be more, who really liked people, loved people—all people. They were the human torches setting aflame the hearts of men so that they passionately fought for the rights of their fellow men, all men. They were hated, feared, and branded as radicals . They wore the epithet of radical as a badge of honor. They fought for the right of men to govern themselves, for the right of men to walk erect as free men and not grovel before kings, for the Bill of Rights, for the abolition of slavery, for public education, and for everything decent and worth while. They loved men and fought for them. Their neighbor’s misery was their misery. They acted as they believed.
— Saul Alinsky
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
...a broken nation, under siege, divisible, without liberty and injustice for a lot...
— Jeffrey G. Duarte
And shall I still be allowed to wear ribbons in my mane?" asked Mollie."Comrade," said Snowball, "those ribbons that you are so devoted to are the badge of slavery. Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than ribbons?"Mollie agreed, but she did not sound very convinced.
— George Orwell, Animal Farm
It is incredible that this must be said, but the obvious seems to escape politicized academics, so we must state the obvious: Genocide is deliberate; it is premeditated. There is no genocide without premeditation. The murders are not unfortunate coincidences. This is why it is called "mass MURDER" and not "mass MANSLAUGHTER.
— A.E. Samaan
The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.
— Harvey Cox, Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology
A Socialist State demands precisely the same human symbols as that of Fascist or Nazi, and the same surrender of human liberties if it is to succeed.
— Eden Phillpotts, Saurus
The vitriol and viciousness is the inevitable result of a government increasingly deciding the vital aspects of people's lives.
— A.E. Samaan
Implicit … in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad....A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together…
— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own
Liberty to the honest man is license to the criminal.
— Jury Nel
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.
— Learned Hand, The Spirit Of Liberty: Papers And Addresses Of Learned Hand
If liberty is abused, get ready for an awkward result
— Sunday Adelaja
To appreciate how income taxation reduces prosperity form what it could be, imagine a 100 percent tax on incomes. We wouldn't expect much prosperity in such a society. People would have no incentive to earn money. They would devote resources to hiding the little they did earn. No investments would be made. No savings would exist to increase living standards. People's activities would be grossly influenced by the tax. If we lower the rate from 100 percent, the principle does not change. . . If you want less of something, tax it.
— Sheldon Richman, Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax
It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity.
— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
An oligarchy does not require a good and moral citizenry but a Constitutional Republic does. If we lose our moral compass, we lose our country.
— R. A. Delmonico
Democracy is the antithesis of liberty. The foundation and cornerstone of liberty is private property and majority rule is thus logically incompatible with this.
— Daniel Alexander Brackins, Private Property, Law, and the State
The obvious definition of a monarchy seems to be that of a state, in which a single person, by whatsoever name he may be distinguished, is entrusted with the execution of the laws, the management of the revenue, and the command of the army. But, unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism. The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people. A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.
— Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I
Will there be people who will have the conscience to contribute to the country by changing themselves first? That is the need of the moment.
— Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Life in this form is one-time chance, death is the inevitable consequence for anyone who is born. The record of one’s death is the primary respect one could render to the lost one. Tears of all relatives of missing people are indeed flowing due to this invaluable action by the authority.
— Nilantha Ilangamuwa
FUCK "UNITY"!! What a pathetic way of thinking. How arrogant of Progressives to think that my hopes and dreams mirror their hopes and dreams. What an absolute bore.... what an total lack of originality or individuality... I believe in individual liberty. I am an extremist on the topic of individual liberty, precisely because I value original thinking and original accomplishments. Fuck unity of purpose. Fuck collectivism. My life is not your life. I have my own path. Get out of my way.
— A.E. Samaan
The "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" begins with "life", and "life" begins at conception.
— A.E. Samaan
Patriotism is the product of successful systematic indoctrination.
— Dane Whalen
Nothing is more likely than that [the] enumeration of powers is defective. This is the ordinary case of all human works. Let us then go on perfecting it by adding by way of amendment to the Constitution those powers which time and trial show are still wanting
— Thomas Jefferson
FUCK UNITY! FUCK CONSENSUS! There was no unity or consensus during the American Revolution. We had principled leadership from a small, vocal, minority that refused to compromise on the issue of individual liberty.
— A.E. Samaan
According to an original reading of the Constitution and Declaration, the intrusiveness that is an inevitable part of big government is an offense against its people.
— A.E. Samaan
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The 'free' laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.
— Karl Marx
I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality [in Europe] producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,...[One] means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.
— Thomas Jefferson
Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.
— Thomas Jefferson
Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.
— Karl Marx
Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.
— Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program
Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.
— Karl Marx
A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
— Walter Lippmann
Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress ofcorpses.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul's enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stalwart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most sacrosant of the molds when they are unable to contain you any longer - these are the great cries of Crete. (Report to Greco)
— N. Kazantzakis
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!
— Benjamin Franklin
Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?
— Alexander Hamilton
People who can't imagine order without imposition always end up favoring power over liberty.
— Jeffrey Tucker
Some capitalism suffers from cronyism. All of socialism is perverted by the crony statism of the powerful few.
— A.E. Samaan
The Supreme Court of the United States is no longer a court of law. It is a forum of legal fad and fashion.
— A.E. Samaan
Sadly enough, individual liberty remains the ideal of revolutionary thinkers even in the 21st Century.
— A.E. Samaan
Liberty is only possible on the condition of regularity. We cannot be free and play the game of life without abiding to the rules, but the rules have to be adapted constantly in line with our experiences and the events we encounter. ( “If he doesn't play ball “ )
— Erik Pevernagie
Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.
— A.E. Samaan
Despots are elected and deposed.Laws are passed and repealed.Nations rise and fall.Individual liberty is eternal.
— A.E. Samaan
Statism is political fashion.Individual liberty is eternal.
— A.E. Samaan
Socialism is "group-think." How uninformed in history do you have to be to advocate for "group-think"??
— A.E. Samaan
Meanwhile, allow me to be me ….in all forms.
— Faith Tigere
I think, therefore I am an individual... not a drone in a collective. I think, therefore I am... Libertarian
— A.E. Samaan
Albeit nurtured in democracy, And liking best that state republican Where every man is Kinglike and no manIs crowned above his fellows, yet I see,Spite of this modern fret for Liberty, Better the rule of One, whom all obey, Than to let clamorous demagogues betrayOur freedom with the kiss of anarchy.Wherefore I love them not whose hands profane Plant the red flag upon the piled-up street For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reignArts, Culture, Reverence, Honor, all things fade, Save Treason and the dagger of her trade, Or Murder with his silent bloody fee.
— Oscar Wilde
Some that read this book will find its Libertarian and Constitutionalist slant a bit obtuse and maybe even off-putting. This author makes no apologies for viewing the history of the eugenics movement from this political perspective. It is the ethical and legal underpinnings of the American Revolution that remain as a guiding light while the eugenics movement continues to reemerge long after its alleged demise. Limited, or rather minimal government, goes a long way to curtail the disconnect that emerges when government grows so large that it no longer feels compelled to heed to the dictates of the governed.
— A.E. Samaan, H.H. Laughlin: American Scientist, American Progressive, Nazi Collaborator
The sadist desires to command and control. The masochist desires to be freed from the burdens of liberty. That is Socialism.
— A.E. Samaan, From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848
Thomas More's Utopia was not a recommendation. It was a warning.
— A.E. Samaan
The U.S. didn't achieve its liberty or prosperity by mistake. It was by design, and the architects were the Founding Fathers. Don't mess with the Constitution. The Constitution matters.
— A.E. Samaan
Very few tyrants argued for the slavery of the masses. Instead, they argued for their right to protect the people from themselves.
— A.E. Samaan
Eugenics has always been the escape valve of single payer socialized medicine. Havelock Ellis was writing about them as one and the same prior to the fin-de-siecle. Culling out of control population growth and the economic drain of the incurably sick has always been a part of socialized medicine.
— A.E. Samaan
Centrally planned economies are upended by out of control population. Their escape valve is eugenics.
— A.E. Samaan
The central planners of Democratic Socialism tighten their noose when people resist their plans and assert their rights. All Socialism is intended to devolve into Communism, and as a result, Totalitarianism.
— A.E. Samaan
I think, therefore I am an individual... not a drone in a collective. I think, therefore I am... Libertarian.
— A.E. Samaan
I was once a statist, and then I researched The Holocaust. I am now a Libertarian.
— A.E. Samaan
There is a very dangerous myth that #Hitler was solely fueled by racism. His desire to engineer society was pervasive. Racism alone cannot explain what happened in The Holocaust without also addressing Hitler's statist policies.
— A.E. Samaan
Liberty isn't everything. I just allows everything to happen.
— A.E. Samaan
You can either have individual liberty, or dependence on the government. One is designed to undo the other.
— A.E. Samaan
You can get to oppression through regulation, especially in an "Idea Economy" which necessitates liberty of the mind to explore.
— A.E. Samaan
Political scientists and professors are the new clergy
—  the clergy of oppression.
Our Supreme Court is not a court of law. It is a court of conjecture and political fad.
— A.E. Samaan
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private liberty.
— A.E. Samaan
Communism is what happens when Socialists realize that they want complete control over every aspect of human life.
— A.E. Samaan
The desire to engineer humanity is a sign of a mind warped by megalomania and lust for power.
— A.E. Samaan
It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
— Joseph Stalin
Big government = oligarchy. Simple equation. Big government = loss of representation.
— A.E. Samaan
A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy.
— A.E. Samaan
Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty
— Ronald Reagan
There is no law, there is only conjecture. The Progressive ethos changes the law's meaning according to fad and fashion.
— A.E. Samaan
History could not be any clearer: Rights given by fad and fashion are just as easily taken away. The Constitution matters.﻿
— A.E. Samaan
[M]an has as much liberty as he is willing to take.
— Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays
To create a free society is not to accomplish the impossible task of convincing all people to abandon aggression, but to accomplish the essential task of convincing enough people to abandon the belief that aggression is ever legitimate.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Government programs didn’t arise because the people demanded them or because the free market was unable to provide needed services. They arose because the politicians found them to be a convenient way to buy votes with other people’s money, a convenient way to enlarge their own power, a convenient way to reward their political cronies, and a convenient way to keep people dependent on government.
— Harry Browne
When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.
— Ron Paul
The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.
— Harry Browne
Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.
— Marquis De Lafayette
True republicanism is the sovereignty of the people. There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate.
— Marquis De Lafayette
If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.
— Marquis De Lafayette
The profit of the one is the profit of the other.
— Frédéric Bastiat
I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry. I love thee as I love Madrid that we have defended and as I love all my comrades that have died. And many have died. Many. Many. Thou canst not think how many. But I love thee as I love what I love most in the world and Ilove thee more.
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
I AM AN INDIAN,LIKE OTHER BILLION,HAPPY REPUBLIC DAY,HOPE TO FIND A GOOD WAY,WHERE THOUGHTS DIVINITY,IS NOT IN INFINITY,ITS UR LIBERTY.
— merlin8thomas
Every command slaps liberty in the face.
— Mikhail Bakhtin
Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence. Certain commodities came to be money quite naturally, as the result of economic relationships that were independent of the power of the state.
— Carl Menger
Malcolm X and Edmund Burke shared an appreciation of this important insight, this painful truth--that the state wants men to be weak and timid, not strong and proud.
— Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts and Pushers
Nowadays the job of the judge is not to do justice. The judge is more of a functionary . He's like a civil servant whose job is to interpret words written down by another branch of the government, whether those words are just or not.
— Stephan Kinsella
It is mainly by resisting authority that the individual defines himself. This is why authorities--whether parental, priestly, political, or psychiatric--must be careful how and where they assert themselves; for while it is true that the more they assert themselves the more they govern, it is also true that the more they assert themselves the more opportunities they offer for being successfully denied.
— Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts and Pushers
Within a world of free trade and democracy there are no incentives for war and conquest. In such a world it is of no concern whether a nation’s sovereignty stretches over a larger or a smaller territory. Its citizens cannot derive any advantage from the annexation of a province. us territorial problems can be treated without bias and passion
—  it is not painful to be fair to other people’s claims for self-determination.
I refuse to let fear subjugate all my freedoms & liberty
—  I refuse to let it be the guiding beacon in my life.
My evanescent anarchistic tendencies are purely classical. I use the word anarchist in the sense in which it was understood by the ancient Greeks. They, of course, accepted the anarchist as a fairly respectable--if somewhat vehement--opponent of government encroachment on the individual's rights to think and act freely. It is in this sense that I glimpse myself as an anarchist--regretting the growth of government and the ever-increasing trend toward regulation and, worst of all, standardization of human activity.
— J. Paul Getty, How to Be Rich
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
— Walt Whitman
The free market is not a system. It is not a policy dictated by anyone in particular. It is not something that Washington implements. It does not exist in any legislation, law, bill, regulation, or book. It is what you get when people act on their own, entirely without central direction, and with their own property, and within human associations of their own creation and in their own interest. It is the beauty that emerges in absence of control.
— Jeffrey Tucker
To eliminate statism is not to physically subdue the rulers, but to mentally liberate the ruled.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Insights are everything. They play central parts in the actualization of destiny. A dangerous insights becomes a colossal executioner. Latching your fate with noble thoughts spares you a life of self-limitation.
— Darmie O-Lujon
It is only you, treading in the blessed path of peace and freedom, who can bring about the true regeneration of society, and with it the true happiness of your own lives.
— Auberon Herbert
Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.
— Zechariah Chafee Jr.
If we regard the state as the father, and the citizens as children, there are three alternatives. First, the father may be bad and despotic:this, most people will agree, was the case in Czarist Russia. Second, the father may be good, but somewhat tyrannical; this is the way the Communist governments in Russia and China picture themselves. Third, the father may not act as a father at all, for the children have grown up, and there is mutual respect among them. All are now governed by the same rules of behavior (laws): this is the Anglo-American concept of nonpaternalistic humanism and liberty under law.
— Thomas Szasz
I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication. For change, stimulus. That petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space. "Then," I cried, half desperate, "grant me at least a new servitude!
— Charlotte Brontë
Here's something I still can't get over. Amazes and thrills me every time. I'm sitting here and want a certain book. So I search, click, and then I have the book. Every time, my heart does a little leap of joy. What a beautiful world the market is making.
— Jeffrey Tucker
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.
— John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
The propensity to say and do dumb things, and even wicked things, is simply part of human nature. One can blame the Church or Christianity for such things only on the thoroughly unwarranted assumption that Christianity claims to have abolished human nature. The truth is that Christianity, and the Catholic Church in particular, is the mother of Western civilization, with all it strengths and weaknesses, including its frequently exaggerated penchant for self-criticism. Like others who know what it is to be a mother, she is not surprised, although sometimes disappointed, when she is blamed for everything and thanked for nothing.
— Richard John Neuhaus
If I am asked, What do you propose to substitute for universal suffrage? Practically, What have you to recommend? I answer at once, Nothing. The whole current of thought and feeling, the whole stream of human affairs, is setting with irresistible force in that direction. The old ways of living, many of which were just as bad in their time as any of our devices can be in ours, are breaking down all over Europe, and are floating this way and that like haycocks in a flood. Nor do I see why any wise man should expend much thought or trouble on trying to save their wrecks. The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.
— James Fitzjames Stephen
Liberty exists as the moral fiber within the political tapestry of man.
— Albert Thomas Bifarelli
THE THREE BEES by Suzy KassemA young boy once askedA wealthy beekeeper:“What is the secret ofYour success?”The beekeeper simply smiledAnd replied:“To be successful,One has to be one of three bees:The queen bee,The hardest working bee,Or the bee that does not fit in.One success is inherited,And the next one is earned.While the last one isSelf-sought,Self-served,And happens on its ownTerms.”“And which bee are you?”Asked the boy.The beekeeper then wipedThe sweat from his headAnd said:“The last may seem the riskiest,But the glory of achievementIs the most rewarding.Freedom always comes at a high cost,But only when you areYour own boss,Can you trulyAfford it.” (Suzy Kassem Poetry)
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.
— Jeffrey Tucker
Modern Western democracies no longer engage in such despotic assaults on freedom, Instead, they deprive people of liberty indirectly, by relieving them of responsibility for their own (allegedly self-injurious) actions and calling the intervention "treatment.
— Thomas Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help? However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder--in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes.
— Thomas Szasz
Our legal system does not grant adults a right to liberty, because they already possess that right; it only revokes the right to liberty (for certain offenses) or restores it (if the deprivation did not conform to due process).
— Thomas Szasz
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold,or do not hold, is looked on as matter of indifference. They can me granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.
— George Orwell, 1984
The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The former embraces absolute power, provided it is used to protect and promote the patient's mental health. The latter rejects absolute power, regardless of its aim or use.
— Thomas Szasz
The government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged 'services' and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.
— Robert Higgs
Only a few prefer liberty- the majority seek nothing more than fair masters.
— Sallust
Honoring the value of competence and steadfastness requires a generosity of spirit and a curbing of the passion for envy, traits that few people value and fewer still cultivate and acquire. Not until there is more of Smith and less of Hobbes in the human heart, will the majority of people prefer peaceful and boring market relations to the violent and exciting relations between coercer and coerced, predator and victim
— Thomas Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
...the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom: for liberty is, to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be, where there is no law: but freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists: (for who could be free, when every other man's humour might domineer over him?) but a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.
— John Locke
I think we need to consider a radical rewrite of any form of patriotism that serves the individual at the expense of the community, as that is nothing more than patriotism to one's own small and solitary cause.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough, A View from the Front Porch: Encounters with Life and Jesus
My liberty depends on you being free, too.
— Barack Obama
I would entertain the apparently fading idea that patriotism that serves the self is greed dressed in the garments of liberty and adorned with the fashion accessories of other associated patriotic notions.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough, A View from the Front Porch: Encounters with Life and Jesus
We don't permit anyone to tell us our business, nor do we wish to tell anyone his. The same goes for moral outlooks. Don't tread on us and we won't on you. We're a tolerant, liberty-loving bunch, we Wolfes.
— James Carlos Blake, The House of Wolfe: A Border Noir
If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.
— Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty
The goal of libertarianism is not to permit people to be free, but to make them realize that they don't need anyone's permission to be free.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Whoever fails in the consideration generally due to the interests and feelings of others, not being compelled by some more imperative duty, or justified by allowable self-preference, is a subject of moral disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it, nor for the errors, merely personal to himself, which may have remotely led to it. In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Immediately after his re-election [Cameron] announced: “For too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens so long as you obey the law we will leave you alone.” A statement so far to the right that it conceded the political centre ground to Judge Dredd.
— Frankie Boyle
How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
The valuations which result in determination of definite prices are different. Each party attaches a higher value to the good he receives than to that he gives away. The exchange ratio, the price, is not the product of equality of valuation, but on the contrary, the product of a discrepancy in valuation.
— Ludwig von Mises
A libertarian is someone who graduated from thinking that there are problems with the state to realizing that the state is the problem.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
To claim that one can be happy without being free is to prove that one has no idea what happiness means.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski, The Pith of Life: Aphorisms in Honor of Liberty
Except now everything is digital even murder. There is a record for everything under the sun from the moon and back whether we like it or not. The image that I have of the future is that it is very bleak. It is darkness visible. The black dog of depression will hang us all in the end. Considering the life we live, the values we teach our children, what we believe in everything is a movement for change and every pause between words is a revolutionary act. The ‘struggle’ was like a painful mental illness. The liberation in retrospect was either the exit from our slavery ushering us into a novel, brave, bold and brilliant world or a mass hallucination. The political climate in post-apartheid South Africa has gone as far as corrupting liberty.
— Abigail George
A slave believes that the law should define the scope of liberty. A free person believes that liberty should define the scope of the law.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski, The Pith of Life: Aphorisms in Honor of Liberty
The only common good is the common liberty to pursue individual goods.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski, The Pith of Life: Aphorisms in Honor of Liberty
Politics is an endless, borderless war against individual liberty.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski, The Pith of Life: Aphorisms in Honor of Liberty
Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.
— Friedrich A. Hayek
Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.
— Ludwig von Mises
Libraries are the mainstays of democracy. The first thing dictators do when taking over a country is close all the libraries, because libraries are full of ideas and differences of opinion, all the things we say we want in a free and open society. So keep ‘em, fund ‘em, embrace and cherish ‘em.
— David Baldacci
[I]t must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence: and in those contests, which so often take place between the one and the other, the latter may, on that account, challenge the preference. Unless perhaps one may say (and it may be said with some reason) that a circumstance, which is essential to the existence of civil society, must always support itself, and needs be guarded with less jealousy, than one that contributes only to its perfection, which the indolence of men is so apt to neglect, or their ignorance to overlook.
— David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary
There are people who think they can dance out of slavery. “I’m going to do escapist drugs and hop from one party or festival to another. I will dance my out of the harsh realities of Planet Earth
— Mark Passio
This is why it is not true that culture can be, even temporarily, suspended in order to make way for a new culture. Man’s unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing cannot be suspended. There is no culture without legacy, and we cannot and must not reject anything of ours, the legacy of the West. Whatever the works of the future may be, they will bear the same secret, made up of courage and freedom, nourished by the daring of thousands of artists of all times and all nations. Yes, when modern tyranny shows us that, even when confined to his calling, the artist is a public enemy, it is right. But in this way tyranny pays its respects, through the artist, to an image of man that nothing has ever been able to crush. My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: “Let us rejoice.
— Albert Camus
Liberty is too precious to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say, 'I'm free'.
— Sidney Buchman, Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Finally liberty has come!
— Liesbeth
Study after study has show that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively *are* less free.
— Edward Snowden
In spite of its alluring name, the welfare state stands or falls by compulsion. It is compulsion imposed upon us with the state’s power to punish noncompliance. Once this is clear, it is equally clear that the welfare state is an evil the same as every restriction of freedom.
— Wilhelm Röpke
Liberty should be understood as freedom from the government, specifically, freedom from the initiation of physical force by the government.
— George Reisman
War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.
— Gustave de Molinari
Freedom is the foundation for all wonderful things in life.
— Jeffrey Tucker
Describing current human mindsets reflecting our ignorance and cowardice and non action-oriented mentality:"I'm going to do nothing but escapist drugs and hop from one party or festival to another. I will dance my way out of the harsh realities of Planet Earth.
— Mark Passio
The phenomenon of economic ignorance is so widespread, and its consequences so frightening, that the objective of reducing that ignorance becomes a goal invested with independent moral worth.
— Israel M. Kirzner
To live your life without oppression, making love the way you wish, loving those you wish to be with - is to live on the right of the spectrum.
— Auliq Ice
Benefit is the only blindfold required to convince ourselves that poison is wine. Liberty's comfort level rises and falls with the sympathies of its children. Well, I for one will not collaborate.
— Fernando A. Torres, A Habit of Resistance
Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended.
— Jonathan Rauch
Ultimately, we need to take control over the money supply out of the hands of our governments and make the production of money again subject to the principle of free association. The first step to endorsing and promoting this strategy is to realize that governments do not—indeed cannot—fulfill any positive role whatever through the control of our money.
— Jörg Guido Hülsmann
A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.
— Victor Hugo
Old: Give me liberty or give me death. - New: Give me liberty or give me debt.
— Orrin Woodward
Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables