bkmarcus.com : quotes : liberty

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964 (1909-1998)
[ but penned by Karl Hess, author of the 1969 Playboy article, "The Death of Politics" -bk]

Anarchists have no quarrel with any institution that contents itself with enforcing the law of equal freedom ... they oppose the State only after first defining it as an institution that claims authority over the non-aggressive individual ...

Benjamin Tucker, Liberty and Politics

Attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell.

Karl Popper

"Saving the world" is just a rationalization for trying to conquer it.

Bob Wallace, "On Not Saving the World"

Liberty should never be mistaken for licence. It is too precious a prize to be degraded by those who accept no obligation to others in the exercise of their freedoms.

Thomas Paine

Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.

The Hippocratic Oath

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.

Andre Gide

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Seneca

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.

Thomas Paine

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

Benjamin Franklin

The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Woodrow Wilson

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

George Washington

A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.

George Washington

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients.

Edmund Burke

Republic ... it means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose.

John Wayne

We can foresee a time when . . . the only people at liberty will be prison guards who will then have to lock up one another.

Albert Camus

Every increase in the size of government necessitates a decrease in an individual's freedom.

Christian Harold Fletcher Riley

All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.

George Bernard Shaw

Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanisms what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don't do the same for 'Time' magazine?

Mark Fowler, former FCC Chairman

We're not really going to get anywhere until we take the criminality out of drugs.

Secretary of State George P. Schultz, PBS, McNeil-Lehrer
News Hour, December 18, 1989

Democracy in America (bourgeois democracy) means nothing more than the domination of the majority over the minority. That is why Black people can cast votes all year long but if the majority is against us, we suffer.

Black Panther Party

... big thieves are ruthless in punishing little thieves.

Diogenes

European intellectuals are so deeply indoctrinated that they cannot perceive that they are servants of power. They see themselves as courageous opponents of power who stand up for human rights and so on, a perception that is completely false.

Noam Chomsky

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded, and the amount of eccentricity in a society has been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

Samuel Adams (1722-1803)

How fortunate for leaders, that the masses do not think.

Adolf Hitler

Why are people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Therefore the people are starving.

Lao Tzu

Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.
Therefore they are rebellious.

Lao Tzu

The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be.

Lao Tzu

The more rules and regulations, The more thieves and robbers.

Lao Tzu

Therefore,
The sage does nothing and people govern themselves,
Provokes no one and people are peaceful,
Does not interfere and people prosper,
Is without desire and people fulfill themselves.

The more people are controlled, the less contented they become.
But when will leaders understand the significance of this?

Lao Tzu

Liberty is the Mother, not the Daughter of Order.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it.

Peter Kropotkin, Law and Authority

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins ... Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

George Bernard Shaw

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

George Bernard Shaw

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.

George Bernard Shaw (1944), Everybody's Political What's What? ch. 30

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

George Bernard Shaw

Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.  Let me illustrate.  Patriotism assumes that oour globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate.  Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot.  It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.

The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course ...

Emma Goldman
Patriotism: A Menace To Liberty
Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.

George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance (1914) p. 85

Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) `Maxims for Revolutionists: The Golden Rule'

If you strike a child take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) `Maxims for Revolutionists: How to Beat Children'

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

George Bernard Shaw

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

George Bernard Shaw

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

George Bernard Shaw

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

Gandhi

One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman.

Gandhi

The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form.

Gandhi

Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Albert Einstein

My body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm ... it is I who suffers, not the state.

Mark Twain

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

George Orwell

Possible things are what the powerful do and what the weak yield to.

Thucydides

We both alike know that in the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where there is equal power to enforce it, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.

Thucydides

All state organizations resist the individual's attempt to control any part of our lives, whether it's physical or neurological, through the medical monopoly.

Timothy Leary, Mavericks of the Mind

In a civil society, citizens make the decisions affecting their lives for themselves. In a political society, government officials make many or even most of those decisions for citizens. The citizen's judgment about what is in his or her own best interest is supplanted by the judgment of others, who may not have the citizen's best interests at heart - or even know what those best interests are.

David Bardallis

All political movements are basically anti-creative -- since a political movement is a form of war.

William S. Burroughs

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

(?)

Accentuate the negative!

Professor Bernardo de la Paz,
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

What we have in this country is socialism for the rich, and free enterprise for the poor.

Gore Vidal

The people never give up their liberty but under some delusion.

Edmund Burke, 1784

Every government program or law eventually requires another program or law to try to make it work. And when that followup program or law doesn't work either, the politicians expand it even further, adding more rules, penalties, surveillance and bureaucrats to administer it.

Gary Snyder, Chairman of the Manhattan Libertarian Party.

Ever notice that when freedom fails, politicians use that failure to justify abandoning freedom, but when the state fails, politicians use the failure to justify expanding the state?

Gary Snyder, Chairman of the Manhattan Libertarian Party.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them.

Albert Einstein

If Stalin ever told me to urinate, I'm not sure I'd be able to.

Phil Donahue

These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.

Groucho Marx

One should respect public opinion insofar as it is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Bertrand Russell

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

Howard Aiken

1935 will go down in History! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient and the world will follow our lead to the future!

Adolf Hitler, prior to confiscating all civilian firearms.

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

David Hume

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

John Gilmore

Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better.

Edgar W. Howe

A little kindness from person to person is better than a vast love for all humankind.

Richard Dehmel

It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

Charles A. Beard

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or to impede their efforts to obtain it.

John Stuart Mill

When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence.

Gary Lloyd

Without using street language, how do you describe those who make a good living by fervently clinging to failed ideas that have killed thousands of people?

James Ostrowski

It is the Nature of Power to be ever encroaching, and converting every extraordinary Power, granted at particular Times, and upon particular Occasions, into an ordinary Power, to be used at all Times, and when there is no Occasion, nor does it ever part willingly with any Advantage....

"Cato's Letters"

It is sure that the workers can never permanently secure themselves in the control of their products except through the method of Liberty; but it is almost equally sure that, unless they are shown what Liberty will do for them in this respect, they will try every other method before they try Liberty.

Benjamin Tucker

"Conservatives want to be your daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do. Liberals want to be your mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose. Libertarians want to treat you as an adult."

some anonymous libertarian

A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.

L. Neil Smith

To complain that a free economy favors the rich is like complaining that free speech favors the eloquent.

Joseph Sobran

"Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?"

George Carlin

Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.

Justice Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Courte,
Lawrence versus Texas [sodomy laws]

The Democrats cry, "The emperor should subsidize the poor!", Republicans argue, "No, the emperor should subsidize the rich!", Libertarians respond, "The emperor wears no clothes", while Terra Librans ask, "Why do they call that naked man emperor?"

Craig Green, Grateful Slave

The exercise of freedom trumps the discomforts of novelty.

Susan Lee

The health of the state and the health of civilization are mutually exclusive concepts.

Too bad such thinking can't be written into a country song.

Christopher Westley, Ph.D.,
Terrorism and the Moral Hazard

Society’s tastes in food, music, sports, and other things are equally transient. So, too, is what society deems proper and improper. For this reason alone, it is foolish for any generation to seek legislation to codify what it considers proper. Doing so imposes on future generations the tastes of their predecessors.

Jon Sanders,
The Tyranny of the Proper

Many Europeans see us as heartless and uncaring because we don't expect Uncle Sam to coddle us from cradle to grave.

Lawrence W. Reed

One does not encourage "responsibility" by forcibly restricting the range of people's authority over their own lives.

Butler Shaffer

Juries regularly convict citizens of various victimless crimes such as drug possession, gun possession, money possession (tax evasion) and free trade (smuggling).

James Ostrowski, What's Wrong with Juries

... juries are now packed with people who make a living from government work or depend on the government for much or all of their income. Expect no sympathy from such jurors in your tax evasion trial. You're what's for dinner.

James Ostrowski, What's Wrong with Juries

Everybody has asked the question ... "What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!

Frederick Douglass, "What the Black Man Wants"

... it is comfortless only to be able to work for one's own petty glory, when one has imagined for a while that one was working for the public good.

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

Arthur C. Clarke

Core principles contain within them the power to slice through billions of other words based on trivia and fallacy. Though we are outnumbered and outgunned on every front, we believe in the power of ideas to make a difference. This is why libertarians write.

Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty

Our age of word proliferation has taught us all to be discriminating readers. Some words matter more than others. If we care about the well-being of our children and their children, words in defense of liberty matter the most.

Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty

The longtime emphasis of the old liberal tradition with regard to war is this: even the victor loses.

Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty

We should pursue a world of minor imperfections rather than accept a world with major imperfections. But we would be wise not to demand political perfection. Messianic societies never attain perfection. They attain only tyranny.

Gary North

In China, the nation is moving in a capitalist direction while still calling it communism. In America, we are moving toward a communist system while calling it freedom. I am not saying I would rather live in China, given how unfree that country still remains. But I would rather live in a "communist" country that is free than a "free" country that is communist.

Steven Greenhut

I don't see myself as conservative, but I'm not ultra-leftist. You build a philosophy of your own. I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone.

Clint Eastwood

Alas! monopoly is as fatal to science as it is to industry. Competition is as necessary a stimulant to economists as it is to the spinners of wool and cotton. In a word, socialist agitation must be given free reign if the French are to learn political economy.

Gustave de Molinari

We've all taken a vow of poverty. It begins, "I pledge allegience to the flag ..."

L. Neil Smith, "The Tyranny of Democracy"

As an individualist, it's hard for me to see even one percent as insignificant, especially since that one percent always seems to include me.

L. Neil Smith, "The Tyranny of Democracy"

Rights aren't additive. Systems which assume that they are labor under the false and dangerous assumption that two people have more rights than one.

L. Neil Smith, "The Tyranny of Democracy"

For our purposes, Utopia might just be a place where people look forward to getting up in the morning.

L. Neil Smith, Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision

Heaven is being able to fire a rifle in any direction from my front porch & not hit anyone but trespassers.

L. Neil Smith, Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision

In the absence of laws against duelling, people will be more polite to each other, less inclined to offer unwanted advice. Either that or, thanks to natural selection, they'll soon have faster reflexes.

L. Neil Smith, Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision

Those who commit irrevocable murder will suffer the cruelest punishment of all: exile to a place where there's a government!

L. Neil Smith, Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision

Those few leftists who still believe in a static notion of how things ought to be, which they're willing to impose at bayonet-point, work their butts off making society dull & boring.

L. Neil Smith, Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision

But perhaps there never will be any libertarian talk radio. The left wing socialists own television, where they communicate in pretty pictographs and can emote to their bleeding hearts' content -- instead of offering ideas and logical argument. The right wing socialists own radio, the "Theater of the Mind". It's the internet, in many ways, the city of the future, that belongs to us.

L. Neil Smith

Prostitution involves sex and free enterprise. Which of these are you opposed to?

Joseph A. Hauptman

Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

L. Neil Smith, The Atlanta Declaration

A system of liberty allows for the individual to be creative, productive, or spiritual on one's own terms, and encourages excellence and virtue. All forms of authoritarianism only exist at the expense of liberty. Yet the humanitarian do-gooders claim to strive for these very same goals. To understand the difference is crucial to the survival of a free society.

Ron Paul, "A Wise Consistency"

None of us, I suspect, really want to go back to some previous age, and encounter the brutality of nature and the rampant ignorance. The comforts and knowledge of our modern age have been a blessing and a legacy of the free market. But what we do want is the renewal of social power, of letting society evolve on its own terms rather than on the dictates of the officials of a central State.

James Leroy Wilson, "Social Power and the New Opposition"

The pursuit of coercive power over others will someday be universally recognized as a symptom of profound mental illness.

L. Neil Smith

Intellectual secession from the ruling regime is the first step to clear, creative thought.

Lew Rockwell, "Libertarianism and the Old Right"

At last, it is clear to anyone who cares about liberty that the real enemy is the ruling regime in government and academia, and that this ruling regime resides within our own borders.

Lew Rockwell, "Libertarianism and the Old Right"

Viewing Keynes as perhaps "the model liberal of the twentieth century" can only render an indispensable historical concept incoherent.

Ralph Raico, "Keynes and the Reds"

[S]uch crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft. (For while theft injures the extension of another?s personality, enslavement injures, and murder obliterates, that personality itself.)

Murray N. Rothbard,
The Myth of National Defense

The libertarian's basic attitude toward war must then be: It is legitimate to use violence against criminals in defense of one's rights of person and property; it is completely impermissible to violate the rights of other innocent people. War, then, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals. We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion.

Murray N. Rothbard,
The Myth of National Defense

The absurdity ... is that egalitarians suppose that justice requires ignoring whether people deserve what they have and whether they are responsible for what they lack.

John Kekes, "The Absurdity of Egalitarianism"

It is not unjust that millionaires have less than billionaires.

John Kekes, "The Absurdity of Egalitarianism"

Libertarians are just promoting consistency to what most people already accept in general.

Terry Liberty Parker

Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We are expected, for example, to believe that the awful events of September 11, 2001 happened, not because we've been murdering people's children and distorting the survivors' lives in the Middle East for almost a century, but because they're all evil over there and envy our freedom -- as if we had that much left to envy.

L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies

If we were only half as interested in liberty as in lust, we would not have half the problems we have.

Dr. Thomas Szasz

There are just two rules of governance in a free society: mind your own business; keep your hands to yourself.

P.J. O'Rourke, speech to the Cato Institute 1993

Without principles which you will adhere to and defend no matter how difficult it becomes (this being the definition of radicalism), you're like a ship without an anchor or rudder, adrift and lost.

L. Neil Smith, "Hollow woman"

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights

It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say 'Enough!' Let our tribute to the September dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.

Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain

This is why the American Revolution was successful, because it wasn't one. Secession is inherently more stable than revolution. Funny how it's more reviled than revolution is.

Jesse Ogden, The Reluctant Anarchist

Boys and girls, please be wary of any sales pitch with only two choices, because it would seem this world, and any world, could hold many, many more.

Jesse Ogden's friend Ridgely

FEE's founder, the late Leonard E. Read, once warned of sinking in a sea of "buts." I believe in freedom and self-responsibility, "but" we need some minimum government social "safety net." I believe in the free market, "but" we need some limited regulation for the "public good." I believe in free trade, "but" we should have some form of protectionism for "essential" industries and jobs. Before you know it, Read warned, the case for freedom has been submerged in an ocean of exceptions."

Richard M. Ebeling, "What Friends of Freedom Can Learn From The Socialists"

If you consistently want individual liberty, you're a libertarian -- not a conservative.

Harry Browne, "Freedom First"

It is nonsense to make any pretence of reconciling the State and liberty.

Vladimir Lenin

There are definitely conservatives who are more pro-capitalism than pro-war, and liberals who are more pro-peace than pro-socialism. On the other hand, there are those on the Right who don't mind the welfare state, so long as it accompanies empire; and there are those on the Left who don't mind bombing a few countries and trashing the Fourth Amendment as long as the government also provides a free lunch. The first kind of leftists and rightists should be working together to oppose the second kind, who always manage to be the ones in control of the state and its two parties.

Anthony Gregory, "Down With Left and Right"

What is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.

George Mason, father of the Bill of Rights

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

Thomas Jefferson's commonplace book, 1774-1776, quoting from On Crimes and Punishment (1764) by criminologist Cesare Beccaria

The real triumph of civilization is the extent to which coercion is banished from human relations.

Anthony Gregory, The Failed War on Terrorism"

Libertarianism in One Sentence: Other people are not your property.

Roderick T. Long

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.

Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom... If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.

Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859)

There is only one cure for the evils that newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.

Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859)

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

P.J. O'Rourke

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