Liberty Quotes

Burke's admonition--The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations--never seems to have occurred to Hayek. The Arnoldian ideal of the disinterested intellectual willing to criticize one side and then the other in order to create balance and counteract the one-sidedness that led toward fanaticism: That, too, was as alien to Hayek as it had been to Marcuse. If it was partisanship that led Hayek to push forward intellectually to new insights, it was also partisanship that kept him from a balanced and rounded philosophy.Perhaps a familiarity with the best that has been thought and said about the market will aid us in obtaining a more disinterested and informed perspective. Such a perspective might well begin with Hayek's insights. But it would by no means end with them. p. 387

~ Jerry Z. Muller

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

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

~ James Madison

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

The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.

~ Christopher Hitchens

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

By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.

~ Isaac Deutscher

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

If you kill, kidnap & rape your opponents claiming that you're fighting the terrorist that is not exist!Soon it'll be existing as you're sowing it!Miserable Egypt!

~ Dr. Muhammad Abdul Mohsin

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

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

~ Boris Pasternak

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

There might, Gentlemen, be an impropriety in my taking notice, in this Address to you, of an anonymous production, but the manner in which that performance has been introduced to the army, the effect it was intended to have, together with some other circumstances, will amply justify my observations on the tendency of that Writing. With respect to the advice given by the Author, to suspect the Man, who shall recommend moderate measures and longer forbearance, I spurn it, as every Man, who regards liberty, and reveres that justice for which we contend, undoubtedly must; for if Men are to be precluded from offering their Sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.

~ George Washington

In arguing against free enterprise capitalism, the collectivist always adopts the false assumption of a fixed number of jobs in that system. Conversely, in arguing for collectivism, he always assumes that there will be as many jobs as there are workers. The government will make the jobs.

~ Isabel Paterson

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

For the primary goal of the American Revolution which transferred American life and introduced a new era in human history, was not the overthrow or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption of the constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty.

~ Bernard Bailyn

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

~ Peter D. Schiff

The idea [passing the 17th amendment] benefited from a unique political and cultural atmosphere that consumed a nation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries-a progressive populism promoting simultaneously radical egalitarianism and centralized authoritarianism.

~ Mark Levin

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour, the long weekend, the all-inclusive island resort, the sunny beach vacation. Happiness is somewhere else, someplace with boat drinks, some secret, distant state of bliss which if they were given would bore them in minutes.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Thomas Jefferson. . . knew what schools were for--to ensure that citizens would know when and how to protect their liberty. . . It would not have come easily to the mind of such a man, as it does to political leaders today, that the young should be taught to read exclusively for the purpose of increasing their economic productivity.

~ Neil Postman

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

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

~ Benjamin Franklin

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

I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed...

~ Frédéric Bastiat

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