Libertarian Quotes of the Week 7
By: James Peron
Tags: Quotes

"However 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, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.”

Gloria Steinem •1934–

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”

Daniel Webster •1782–1852

“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.”

Ayn Rand • 1905–1982

H.L. Mencken

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

H.L. Mencken • 1880–1956

By virtue of exchange, one man’s prosperity is beneficial to all others.

Frédéric Bastiat • 1801–1850

Where there is one common all-overriding end there is no room for any general morals or rules… Where a few specific ends dominate the whole of society, it is inevitable that occasionally cruelty may become a duty, that acts which revolt all our feeling, such as the shooting of hostages or the killing of the old or sick, should be treated as mere matters of expediency, that the compulsory uprooting and transportation of hundreds of thousands should become an instrument of policy approved by almost everybody except the victims, or that suggestions like that of a ‘conscription of woman for breeding purposes’ can be seriously contemplated. There is always in the eyes of the collectivist a greater goal which these acts serve and which to him justifies them because the pursuit of the common end of society can know no limits in any rights or values of any individual.”

F.A. Hayek • 1899–1992

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”

Albert Camus • 1913–1960

“When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.”

Rose Wilder Lane • 1886–1968

“To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton • 1815–1902

“There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom — freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement.”

Eric Hoffer •1898–1983

“No nation was ever ruined by trade, even seemingly the most disadvantageous.”

Benjamin Franklin •1706–1790

“The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.”

Daniel Webster •1782–1852

Steve Biko

“Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday; loyalties are tested far more severely; sceptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behaviour, if they do not care to identify themselves with an organised movement, are objects of fear or derision and targets for persecution for either side, execrated or despised by all the embattled parties in the great ideological wars of our time……In the world today, individual stupidity and wickedness are forgiven far more easily than failure to be identified with a recognised party or attitude, [or failure] to achieve an approved political or economic or intellectual status.”

Isaiah Berlin

1909–1997

“The most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

Steve Biko 1946–1977

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