Freedom Quotes

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

~ Victor Hugo

The disdain of profit is due to ignorance, and to an attitude that we may if we wish admire in the ascetic who has chosen to be content with a small share of the riches of this world, but which, when actualised in the form of restrictions on profits of others, is selfish to the extent that it imposes asceticism, and indeed deprivations of all sorts, on others.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

He who let's the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation

~ John Stuart Mill

Mai whispers, “Why did she have to leave? When she was there, I knew where I had her; she was safe.”“You of all people,” Nicholas says, “should know that freedom is more important than being safe.

~ E.j. Squires

Mai whispers, “Why did she have to leave? When she was there, I knew where I had her; she was safe.”When she was there? I winder. Who is ‘she’ and where is ‘where?’ I knew where I had her? Who are they talking about? Me? “You of all people,” Nicholas says, “should know that freedom is more important than being safe.

~ E.j. Squires

Joy is a right and liberty of non other than me and you who struggled and fought for it and attained it at last.

~ Auliq Ice

No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.

~ Rose Wilder Lane

Don't let people supervise your life, If you know who you are, you shouldn't be living in that prison of dominance, live by your orders, you are your own soldier.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly “reforming” their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact they’re always busy “reforming” is an implicit admission that they didn’t get it right the first 50 times.

~ Lawrence W. Reed

Liberation for who does not have a shack and freedom for who does not know how to live is fatal.

~ Alireza Salehi Nejad

Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of its worth and will have the courage to defend it.

~ Joaquim Nabuco

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).

~ Robert Nozick

They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

~ Albert Camus

Since Shakespeare had a feel for revolutionary rhetoric, let’s all cry: “Peace, freedom and liberty!

~ Carl William Brown

But then I grew up, experienced some life, and I understood that when you merely switch from being a prisoner to being a guard, no one is freed, not even yourself.

~ Lisa Crystal Carver

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss—the abyss from which there is no return.

~ James Bamford

There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within--not without. It is each man's own affair.

~ H.g. Wells

So what? Why should an a priori proof of the libertarian property theory make any difference? Why not engage in aggression anyway?” Why indeed?! But then, why should the proof that 1+1=2 make any difference? One certainly can still act on the belief that 1+1=3. The obvious answer is “because a propositional justification exists for doing one thing, but not for doing another.” But why should we be reasonable, is the next come-back. Again, the answer is obvious. For one, because it would be impossible to argue against it; and further, because the proponent raising this question would already affirm the use of reason in his act of questioning it. This still might not suffice and everyone knows that it would not, for even if the libertarian ethic and argumentative reasoning must be regarded as ultimately justified, this still does not preclude that people will act on the basis of unjustified beliefs either because they don’t know, they don’t care, or they prefer not to know. I fail to see why this should be surprising or make the proof somehow defective.

~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I don't want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.

~ Peter D. Schiff

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

Living off others is a form of bondage—for if you take from a person his responsibility to care for himself, you also take from him the opportunity to be free.

~ Cameron C. Taylor

A person who says “every person has a right to a decent education” may not actually mean “people should be robbed to support bad schools” or “all children should be forced into a prison-like building for 12 years.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.

~ Frédéric Bastiat

Collectivists see the world the way Mr. Magoo did—as one big blur. They homogenize people in a communal blender, sacrificing the discrete features that make us who we are.

~ Lawrence W. Reed

The State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as “taxation,” although in less regularized epochs it was often known as “tribute.” Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

As I explain in 'What It Means to be an Anarcho-Capitalist', to be an anarchist simply means you oppose aggression, and you realize the state necessarily commits aggression. If you are not an anarchist, it means you either condone aggression, or think the state does not necessarily commit aggression. As you say you are not an anarchist, can you please tell us which one describes you? Are you in favor of aggression (like socialists and criminals are)? Or, do you think the state does not commit aggression (like children brainwashed by government schools think)?

~ N. Stephan Kinsella

A man goes to a foreign country and kills somebody who's not aggressing against him; in a Hawaiian shirt he's a criminal, in a green costume he's a hero who gets a parade and a pension. So that, as a culture, we remain in a state of moral insanity. To point out these contradictions to people in society is to be labeled insane. This is how insane society remains, that anybody who points out logical opposites in the most essential human topic of ethics, is considered to be insane.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.

~ Isabel Paterson

Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, bunglingly, at greater cost, and with less fruit than spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it deems its prerogative, or through the overwhelming competition which it exercises, it kills or paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, atropic or abortive, are lost to the great social body.

~ Hippolyte Taine

Many rabble-rousers for libertarianism, liberty and freedom are unwitting pawns of controllers they have never even considered.

~ Bryant Mcgill

If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.

~ Lysander Spooner

I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.

~ Milton Friedman

Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?

~ Murray N. Rothbard

Government” itself does no harm, because it is a fictional entity. But the belief in “government” – the notion that some people actually have the moral right to rule over others – has caused immeasurable pain and suffering, injustice and oppression, enslavement and death.

~ #Name?

Can social progress be made without government?It's like saying 'can happiness be achieved without the initiation of violence? Can romance be achieved without rape? Can profitability be achieved without theft? Can economic growth be achieved without the mass indebted enslavement and counterfeiting of the federal reserve?'.

~ Stefan Molyneux

The welfare of a people lies not in casting other peoples down but in peaceful collaboration.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

He who in given cases consents to obey his fellows with servility, and who submits his will, and even his thoughts, to their control, how can he pretend that he wishes to be free?

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Some say it's wrong to profit from the misfortune of others. I ask my students whether they'd support a law against doing so. But I caution them with some examples. An orthopedist profits from your misfortune of having broken your leg skiing. When there's news of a pending ice storm, I doubt whether it saddens the hearts of those in the collision repair business. I also tell my students that I profit from their misfortune—their ignorance of economic theory.

~ Walter E. Williams