Liberty Quotes

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

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

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

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.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

I refuse to let fear subjugate all my freedoms & liberty, I refuse to let it be the guiding beacon in my life.

~ Mamur Mustapha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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

My liberty depends on you being free, too.

~ Barack Obama