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Libertarian Quotes

(in no particular order)

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  1. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul. – George Bernard Shaw

     

  2. America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. – James Bovard

  3. War is just one more big government program. – Joseph Sobran

  4. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. – John Adams (1814)

  5. They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin

  6. One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. – Thomas B. Reed (1886)

  7. If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all. – Jacob Hornberger (1995)

  8. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. – P.J. O'Rourke

  9. The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates. – Tacitus

  10. Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. – George Washington

  11. No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. – Mark Twain (1866)

  12. 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

  13. The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away, for expedients. – Edmund Burke (1899)

  14. Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none. – Thomas Jefferson

  15. The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society. – Mark Skousen

  16. A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. – Thomas Jefferson (1801)

  17. The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. – John Hay (1872)

  18. Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. – James Bovard (1994)

  19. The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. – Thomas Jefferson

  20. Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty. – Thomas Jefferson

  21. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. – Goethe

  22. 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

  23. Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. – H.L. Mencken

  24. The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. – H.L. Mencken

  25. It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve. – Henry George

  26. Where morality is present, laws are unnecessary. Without morality, laws are unenforceable. – Anonymous

  27. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. – Barry Goldwater (1964)

  28. Liberty is not a means to a political end. It is itself the highest political end. – Lord Acton

  29. The power to tax is the power to destroy. – John Marshall

  30. [On ancient Athens]: In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. – Edward Gibbon

  31. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis

  32. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. – Lysander Spooner

  33. In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty. – Leo Tolstoy

  34. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws. – Ayn Rand

  35. If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. – Samuel Adams

  36. If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. – Somerset Maugham

  37. A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. – Alexander Tytler

  38. A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. – G. Gordon Liddy

  39. The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced. – Frank Zappa

  40. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. – Justice Learned Hand

  41. 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

  42. A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. – Edward R. Murrow

  43. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. – Thomas Jefferson (1781)

  44. The desire to rule is the mother of heresies. – St. John Chrysostom

  45. Can our form of government, our system of justice, survive if one can be denied a freedom because he might abuse it? – Harlon Carter

  46. It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself. – Justice Casey Percell

  47. No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights. – Edmund A. Opitz

  48. The government was set to protect man from criminals – and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. – Ayn Rand

  49. The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. – Mark Twain

  50. What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. – Edward Langley

  51. I believe that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other men's rights. – Abraham Lincoln

  52. Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. – Thomas Paine

  53. Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have. – Harry Emerson Fosdick

  54. The state in which the rulers are the most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed; and the state in which they are the most eager, the worst. – Anonymous

  55. It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. – Calvin Coolidge

  56. To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. – Thomas Jefferson

  57. It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. – Voltaire

  58. The war for freedom will never really be won because the price of our freedom is constant vigilance over ourselves and over our Government. – Eleanor Roosevelt

  59. Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. – Herbert Hoover

  60. Give me liberty or give me death! – Patrick Henry

  61. First they came for the Jews, but I did nothing because I'm not a Jew. Then they came for the socialists, but I did nothing because I'm not a socialist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I did nothing because I'm not a Catholic. Finally, they came for me, but by then there was no one left to help me. – Pastor Father Niemoller (1946)

  62. Government at its best is a necessary evil, and at its worst, an intolerant one. – Thomas Paine

  63. There's never been a good government. – Emma Goldman

  64. We must have government, but we must watch them like a hawk. – Millicent Fenwick (1983)

  65. Useless laws weaken the necessary laws. – Montesquieu

  66. A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them. – P. J. O'Rourke

  67. Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. – Henry David Thoreau

  68. Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. – Mark Twain

  69. There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress. – Mark Twain

  70. Talk is cheap – except when Congress does it. – Cullen Hightower

  71. You cannot adopt politics as a profession and remain honest. – Ambrose Gwinett Bierce

  72. [Political] offices are as acceptable here as elsewhere, and whenever a man cast a longing eye on them, a rottenness begins in his conduct. – Thomas Jefferson (1799)

  73. The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare. – Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1976)

  74. The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire. – Joseph Sobran (1995)

  75. Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more. – Allan H. Meltzer (1993)

  76. When important issues affecting the life of an individual are decided by somebody else, it makes no difference to the individual whether that somebody else is a king, a dictator, or society at large. – James Taggart (1992)

  77. No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power. – P. J. O'Rourke (1992)

  78. Here's your enemy for this week, the government says. And some gullible Americans click their heels and salute – often without knowing who or even where the enemy of the week is. – Charley Reese (1998)

  79. The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another. – Milton Friedman

  80. The best government is the one that charges you the least blackmail for leaving you alone. – Thomas Rudmose-Brown (1996)

  81. If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free. – P.J. O'Rourke (1993)

  82. The Government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other. – Ronald Reagan

  83. Americans have the right and advantage of being armed – unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. – James Madison

  84. The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals … It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of. – Albert Gallatin (1789)

  85. The Constitution shall never be construed … to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. – Samuel Adams

  86. I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it. – Alexis De Toqueville

  87. I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. – Thomas Jefferson (1800)

  88. I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy – but that could change. – Al Gore

  89. If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. – Winston Churchill

  90. Tyranny is always better organized than freedom. – Charles Peguy

  91. The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. – George Washington

  92. A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4BC - 65AD.

  93. He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one. – the Bible, Luke 22:36.

  94. Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest. – Mahatma Gandhi, in Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 446

  95. Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery. – Benjamin Disraeli, 1874

  96. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations. – UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29(3).

  97. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. – Winston Churchill

  98. There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. – P.J. O'Rourke (1993)

  99. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. – Ronald Reagan (1986)

  100. I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature. – Sidney Hook

  101. War is the health of the State. – Randolph Bourne (1917)

  102. Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. – Douglas Casey (1992)

  103. If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist. – Joseph Sobran (1995)

  104. In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. – Voltaire (1764)

  105. Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. – William Pitt (1783)

  106. When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. – P.J. O'Rourke

  107. A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. – Barry Goldwater (1964)

  108. I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. – Will Rogers

  109. Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program. – Milton Friedman

  110. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H.L. Mencken

  111. There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself. – P.J. O'Rourke (1993)

  112. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. – Robert A. Heinlein

  113. Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. – Pericles (430 BC)

  114. There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money – if a gun is held to his head. – P.J. O'Rourke

  115. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. – Herbert Spencer (1891)

  116. More laws, less justice. – Marcus Tullius Ciceroca (42 BC)

  117. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. – Thomas Jefferson

  118. Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others. – William Allen White

  119. I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war. – Thomas Jefferson (1823)

  120. America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She well knows that by enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom. – John Quincy Adams (1821)

  121. An Avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he a establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. – Thomas Paine (1795)

  122. Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. – Frederic Bastiat

  123. Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what your government is doing to you. – Joseph Sobran (1990)

  124. God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it. – Daniel Webster (1834)

  125. The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time. – Justice George Sutherland (1938)

  126. The era of resisting big government is never over. – Paul Gigot (1998)

  127. Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them. – Thomas Paine (1776)

  128. Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. – Honore de Balzac

  129. Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production. – Ludwig von Mises (1920)

  130. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government that is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. – James Madison

  131. Let the people think they govern and they will be governed. – William Penn (1693)

  132. In 1940, teachers were asked what they regarded as the three major problems in American schools. They identified the three major problems as: Littering, noise, and chewing gum. Teachers last year were asked what the three major problems in American schools were, and they defined them as: Rape, assault, and suicide. – William Bennett (1993)

  133. The threat posed by humans to the natural environment is nothing compared to the threat to humans posed by global environmental policy. – Fred L. Smith (1992)

  134. The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom – they are the pillars of society. – Henrik Ibsen (1877)

  135. Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent. – H. L. Mencken

  136. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? – Thomas Jefferson (1801)

  137. This country is a one-party country. Half of it is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn't make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians. – Hugh Downs (1997)

  138. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. – Lord Acton (1887)

  139. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. – Mao Zedong (1938)

  140. The difference between libertarianism and socialism is that libertarians will tolerate the existence of a socialist community, but socialists can't tolerate a libertarian community. – David D. Boaz (1997)

  141. We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. – Winston Churchill (1903)

  142. If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves. – Thomas Sowell (1992)

  143. War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results. – Joseph Sobran (1991)

  144. There never was a good war or a bad peace. – Benjamin Franklin (1773)

  145. 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)

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

  147. Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. – George Bernard Shaw

  148. In matters of Power, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. – Thomas Jefferson

  149. The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests. – Patrick Henry

  150. The strength of the Constitution, lies in the will of the people to defend it. – Thomas Edison

  151. The Constitution is a written instrument. As such, its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when it was adopted, it means now. – South Carolina v. United States, 199 U.S. 437, 448 (1905)

  152. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens. – Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"

  153. Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. – H.L. Mencken

  154. Collectivism doesn't work because it's based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person's "fair share" of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless. – P. J. O'Rourke, "How to Explain Conservatism"

  155. Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. – Ludwig von Mises

  156. The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced. If the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt, people must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. – Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 BC

  157. Liberals want the government to be your Mommy. Conservatives want government to be your Daddy. Libertarians want it to treat you like an adult. – Andre Marrou

  158. If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

  159. Liberty consists in doing what one desires. – John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

  160. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. – John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

  161. Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free. – Harry Browne

  162. If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. – Noam Chomsky

  163. I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. – Aldous Huxley

  164. The care of every man's soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills. – Thomas Jefferson

  165. America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. – Ayn Rand

  166. There's always someone telling you not to do something. The main thing is just to ignore them. – Tim Robbins

  167. Everyone thinks about changing the world, but no one thinks about changing himself. – Leo Tolstoy

  168. One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. – Plato

  169. Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention. – Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

  170. The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner. – Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session (February 1982)

  171. When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both. – James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union

  172. If we have to kill 12 people to save 1 human life it will have been worth it. – Unknown

  173. Virtually all reasonable laws are obeyed, not because they are the law, but because reasonable people would do that anyway. If you obey a law simply because it is the law, that's a pretty likely sign that it shouldn't be a law. – Unknown

  174. The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it's a whole lot better than what we have now. – Unknown

  175. The welfare state reduces a citizen to a client, subordinates them to a bureaucrat, and subjects them to rules that are anti-work, anti-family, anti-opportunity and anti-property … Humans forced to suffer under such anti-human rules naturally develop pathologies. The evening news is the natural result of the welfare state. – Unknown

  176. I do not believe that the government should have its long nose poked into the private consensual relationships between people. – John Anderson, Independent presidential candidate, 1980

  177. When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will. – Fredric Bastiat, early French economist

  178. Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire. – Ludwig Mises,

  179. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial … the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding. – Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

  180. Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior products of politically favored companies. – Alan Burris, "A Liberty Primer"

  181. Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers. – Frank Chodorov

  182. The legacy of Democrats and Republicans approaches: Libertarianism by bankruptcy. – Nick Nuessle, 1992

  183. Truth and news are not the same thing. – Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post

  184. The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer. – Henry Kissinger

  185. We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. – Stephen Schneider, environmental activist, in "Discover", Oct. '89

  186. I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS. – Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism

  187. Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism 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, FCC Chairman

  188. The usual road to slavery is that first they take away your guns, then they take away your property, then last of all they tell you to shut up and say you are enjoying it. – James A. Donald

  189. Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. – Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist

  190. The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books. – Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist

  191. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark - Mapp vs. Ohio

  192. If we were directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we would soon want for bread. – Thomas Jefferson

  193. Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation. – Fletcher Knebel, historian

  194. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. – George Santayana

  195. Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his. – John Locke, 1690

  196. There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation. – James Madison

  197. Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. – Robert Nozick, Harvard philosopher

  198. Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does. – US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991

  199. The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people. – Congressman Ron Paul, 1987

  200. The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave. – Ayn Rand

  201. I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics. – Ayn Rand

  202. They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here? – Paul Harvey 8/31/94

  203. Even the most Bush-happy, flag suckling jack-arse knows deep-down inside that something is wrong. America is over and everyone knows it. The New World Order has a dying empire odor and changing the channel ain't going to make this go away. – Jello Biafra

  204. If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence … and the courts must abide by that decision. – US v Moylan, 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, 1969, 417 F.2d at 1006

  205. Love your country but fear its government. – N.E. folk wisdom

  206. Where is it written in the Constitution, in what section or clause is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battle in any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it? – Daniel Webster

  207. There are many farm handouts; but let's call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, "Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you." – Walter Williams, economist and syndicated columnist

  208. National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S. … and the cost accounting of the Pentagon. – Louis Sullivan/Connie Horner quoted by Novak in _Forbes_

  209. Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA – ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State. – Heinrich Himmler

  210. The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words. – The Atlanta Journal

  211. Government does not grow by seizing our freedoms, but by assuming our responsibilities. – Michael Cloud

  212. The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, "See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk". – Harry Browne

  213. Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them. – Ronald Reagan

  214. The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom. – Justice William O. Douglas

  215. Why doesn't everybody just leave everybody else the hell alone? – Jimmy Durante

  216. 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 in the future! – Adolf Hitler

  217. After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. – William S. Burroughs

  218. To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors. – John Stuart Mill

  219. When taxes are too high, people go hungry. – Lao Tsu

  220. Show me a movement that doesn't hate somebody and I will join it at once. – Robert Anton Wilson

  221. What's *just* has been debated for centuries but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn *belongs* to you – and why? – Walter Williams

  222. Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves. – Henry David Thoreau

  223. No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: "But what would you replace it with?" When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with? – Thomas Sowell

  224. A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort … is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence. – Ayn Rand

  225. Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. – Thomas Paine

  226. 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

  227. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. – Abraham Lincoln

  228. The more laws and restrictions there are, the poorer the people become. – Lao Tsu

  229. When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated. – Thomas Jefferson

  230. In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place. – Mohandas Gandhi

  231. Force always attracts men of low morality. – Albert Einstein

  232. A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot – because the first leads inevitably to the second. – Harry Browne

  233. It is not charity if it's at the point of a gun. – Unknown

  234. The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. – Ayn Rand

  235. When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress? – Marilyn French

  236. No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. – Ronald Reagan

  237. There is no more country – everyone go home. – Bracken

  238. I'm not going to pontificate and tell you to execute your government at dawn, but it wouldn't be a bad idea. – John Lydon

  239. Society exists for the benefit of its members – not the members for the benefit of society. – Herbert Spencer

  240. When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty. – George Mason

  241. What is a Communist? One who has yearnings – for equal division of unequal earnings. – Ebenezer Elliot

  242. Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism. – Mary McCarthy

  243. Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression. – Dick Feagler

  244. There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation. – Frιdιric Bastiat

  245. The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace. – H. L. Mencken

  246. A man should be upright, not be kept upright. – Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

  247. Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee. – F. Lee Bailey

  248. Socialists make the mistake of confusing individual worth with success. They believe you cannot allow people to succeed in case those who fail feel worthless. – Kenneth Baker

  249. Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it. – Mikhail Bakunin

  250. Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone. – Frιdιric Bastiat

  251. People fear witches, and burn women. – Justice Louis Brandeis

  252. The American heritage was one of individual liberty, personal responsibility and freedom from government … Unfortunately … that heritage has been lost. Americans no longer have the freedom to direct their own lives … Today, it is the government that is free – free to do whatever it wants. There is no subject, no issue, no matter … that is not subject to legislation. – Harry Browne

  253. Communism is like one big phone company. – Lenny Bruce

  254. The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. – Edmund Burke

  255. If we have learned anything in the past quarter century, it is that we cannot Federalize Virtue. – George Bush

  256. It must never be unpatriotic to support your country against your government. It must always be unpatriotic to support your government against your country. – Stephen T. Byington

  257. Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging than the drug itself. – Jimmy Carter

  258. The office of the government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves. – William Ellery Channing

  259. If you ruin your life, you will pay the price of rehabilitating yourself … We are not punished for our sins, but by them. Liberty means responsibility. – Michael Cloud

  260. We are living in a sick society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them. – William L. Comer

  261. America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation. – Henry Steele Commager

  262. Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business. – Calvin Coolidge

  263. You can only be free if I am free. – Clarence Darrow

  264. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment. – Philip K. Dick

  265. When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all. – Justice William O. Douglas

  266. A tyranny based on … deception and maintained by terror must inevitably perish from the poison it generates within itself. – Albert Einstein

  267. Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

  268. That which we call sin in others is experiment for us. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

  269. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves. – Marilyn Ferguson

  270. Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion – the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals – the technique of the marketplace. – Milton Friedman

  271. Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless or, which is the same thing, corrupt. – Mohandas Gandhi

  272. The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of oppression, if they are strong enough, whether by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable. – Ulysses S. Grant

  273. The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed. – Alexander Hamilton

  274. Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison. – John Hardwick

  275. Past studies by and large confirm the prediction that higher minimum wages reduce employment opportunities and raise unemployment, particularly among teenagers, minorities and other low-skilled workers. – Masanori Hashimoto

  276. We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation. – William Hazlitt

  277. Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery! Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! – Patrick Henry

  278. The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force. – Adolf Hitler

  279. I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own. – Billie Holiday

  280. Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control. – Jack Hugh

  281. When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free. – Charles Evans Hughes

  282. I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. – Thomas Jefferson

  283. It's no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of duty. – Albert Einstein

  284. On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. – Thomas Jefferson

  285. According to George Hitchings, co-winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in medicine, FDA's five-year delay in approving the antibacterial drug Septra cost 80,000 lives. – Sam Kazman

  286. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

  287. I let go of all desire for the common good, and the good becomes as common as the grass. – Lao Tsu

  288. If men are good, you don't need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don't dare have one. – Robert LeFevre

  289. Low-income workers as a group are the major victims of minimum wage legislation. – Keith B. Leffler

  290. Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. – Abraham Lincoln

  291. Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive. – Carolyn Lochhead

  292. Those who attack the rationale of the game, and not the players, are its most formidable adversaries. – James J. Martin

  293. Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth. – Mohandas Gandhi

  294. If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded. – Karl Marx

  295. In 1950, the average family of four paid 2% of its earnings to federal taxes. Today it pays 24%– William R. Mattox, Jr. (sometime before 1996)

  296. Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy. – Ludwig von Mises

  297. When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
    When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.
    When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun.
    Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet. – Lyle Myhr

  298. In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then, they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew … Then they came for the Catholics. I didn't speak up then because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up. – Reverend Martin Niemoller, German Lutheran pastor arrested by the Gestapo in 1937.

  299. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money. – P.J. O'Rourke

  300. Petty laws breed great crimes. – Ouida

  301. The essential psychological requirement of a free society is the willingness on the part of the individual to accept responsibility for his life. – Edith Packer

  302. When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny. – Thomas Paine

  303. The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. – Thomas Jefferson

  304. The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence. All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals. Legitimate use of violence can only be that which is required in self-defense. – Congressman Ron Paul, (R) Texas

  305. As you increase the cost of the license to practice medicine, you increase the price at which the medical service must be sold and you correspondingly decrease the number of people who can afford to buy the service. – William Pusey, then president of the American Medical Association

  306. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand

  307. The American Dream was not about government's taking huge sums of money (under the label of "taxation") from citizens by force. The American Dream was about individualism and the opportunity to achieve success without interference from others. – Robert Ringer

  308. Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it. – Will Rogers

  309. I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control. – George L. Roman

  310. The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day. – Theodore Roosevelt

  311. Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. – Seneca

  312. Armed people are free. No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist, no mob can take their liberty and property. And no 220-pound thug can threaten the well-being or dignity of a 110-pound woman who has two pounds of iron to even things out … People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically "right." Guns ended that, and a social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work. – L. Neil Smith (from The Probability Broach)

  313. Let him who would move the world, first move himself. – Socrates

  314. What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long. – Thomas Sowell

  315. The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within. – Mohandas Gandhi

  316. However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible. – Herbert Spencer (from "The Right To Ignore The State")

  317. The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit … Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do … He does not keep "protecting" you by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that. – Lysander Spooner

  318. If I were a Brazilian without land or money or the means to feed my children, I would be burning the rain forest too. – Sting

  319. I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body. – Thomas Szasz

  320. That government is best which governs least. – Henry David Thoreau

  321. In the beginning of a change, the Patriot is a scarce man and brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a Patriot. – Mark Twain

  322. I love my country far too much to be a nationalist. – Unknown

  323. I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. – Voltaire

  324. If even one new drug of the stature of penicillin or digitalis has been unjustifiably banished to a company's back shelf because of exceedingly stringent regulatory requirements, that event will have harmed more people than all the toxicity that has occurred in the history of modern drug development. – William Wardell

  325. It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something. – John Wayne

  326. Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any body of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. – Noah Webster

  327. Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy. – Orson Welles

  328. Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks. The compelling issue to both conservatives and liberals is not whether it is legitimate for government to confiscate one's property to give to another, the debate is over the disposition of the pillage. – Walter Williams

  329. Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence. – Robert Anton Wilson

  330. Government, in it's last analysis, is organized force. – Woodrow Wilson

  331. Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it. – Cousin Woodman

  332. The proper direction of man's thought is not toward the creation of new laws for government, but toward the acceptance of every person's moral dignity. – Edmund Yates

  333. The higher entry standards imposed by licensing laws reduce the supply of professional services … The poor are the net losers, because the availability of low-cost service has been reduced. In essence, the poor subsidize the information research costs of the rich. – S. David Young

  334. The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge. – U.S. vs. Dougherty, 1972

  335. The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising. – Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japanese Shogun, August 29, 1558

  336. We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: … an end to the power of the financial interests. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand … the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our entire system of public education … We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents … The government must undertake the improvement of public health – by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor … by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth. We combat the … materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of the common good before the individual good. – From the political program of the Nazi Party, adopted in Munich, February 24, 1920

  337. I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials. – George Mason.

  338. The proverb warns that "You should not bite the hand that feeds you." But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself. – Thomas Szasz

  339. When freedom is outlawed … Only outlaws will be free! – Anon

  340. I have always thanked all my enemies profusely for expanding my horizons. – Unknown

  341. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. – The Wizard of Oz

  342. People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us. – Joseph Sobran May 13, 1998 (commenting on US vs Microsoft)

  343. I believe the states can best govern our home concerns and the federal government our foreign ones. – Thomas Jefferson

  344. It took about 150 years, starting with a Bill of Rights that reserved to the states and the people all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government, to produce a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing corn to feed to your own hogs is interstate commerce and can therefore be regulated by Congress. – David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom

  345. I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce. – J. Edgar Hoover

  346. First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He created school boards. – Mark Twain

  347. The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder. – Frιdιric Bastiat

  348. The police can't stop an intruder, mugger, or stalker from hurting you. They can pursue him only after he has hurt or killed you. Protecting yourself from harm is your responsibility, and you are far less likely to be hurt in a neighborhood of gun-owners than in one of disarmed citizens – even if you don't own a gun yourself. – Harry Browne

  349. The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke

  350. Patriotism means loving our country, not the government. – Michael Cloud

  351. Conservatives and liberals are kindred spirits as far as government spending is concerned. First, let's make sure we understand what government spending is. Since government has no resources of its own, and since there's no Tooth Fairy handing Congress the funds for the programs it enacts, we are forced to recognize that government spending is no less than the confiscation of one person's property to give it to another to whom it does not belong – in effect, legalized theft. – Walter Williams

  352. The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people. – Justice William O. Douglas

  353. The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this. – Albert Einstein

  354. I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal. – Milton Friedman

  355. One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman. – Mohandas Gandhi

  356. The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits. – Thomas Jefferson

  357. There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

  358. The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be. – Lao Tsu

  359. You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have. – P.J. O'Rourke

  360. A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody. – Thomas Paine

  361. Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one's fellow man … that's what competition is all about: "outpleasing" your competitors to win over the consumers. – Walter Williams

  362. To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine. – Robert Anton Wilson

  363. A strong body makes a strong mind. As to the species of exercise I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion of your walks. – Thomas Jefferson

  364. The World's Smallest Political Quiz is the single best outreach tool we libertarians have. –George Getz, Libertarian Party press secretary

  365. Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins. – Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, whose testimony convicted John Gotti

  366. Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. – Josef V. Stalin

  367. In our desire to have government become our benefactor and sustainer, we have allowed it to become our taskmaster and overlord. As a result, we have become little more than well-fed, well-entertained slaves to the state. Freedom, as envisioned by our forefathers, is gone. – Chuck Baldwin 2001 (www.chuckbaldwinlive.com)

  368. To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. – Richard Henry Lee (who drafted the Second Amendment as well as the rest of the Bill of Rights) 1788

  369. Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles. – Gerry Spence

  370. I say that the Second Amendment doesn't allow for exceptions – or else it would have read that the right "to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, unless Congress chooses otherwise." And because there are no exceptions, I disagree with my fellow panelists who say the existing gun laws should be enforced. Those laws are unconstitutional [and] wrong – because they put you at a disadvantage to armed criminals, to whom the laws are no inconvenience. – Harry Browne, meetings with NRA's EVP, Wayne LaPierre and other panelists at a gun rights rally in Hot Springs, AR, 8/8/2000

  371. The angels and the devils are definitely within us, not within the machines we use. – Michael Dertouzos

  372. The limitation of tyrants is the endurance of those they oppose. – Frederick Douglass

  373. Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice. – William Lloyd Garrison

  374. The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency. – Eugene McCarthy

  375. The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy. – John Jay, Joint-author of the Federalist Papers and first U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice

  376. There ain't no rules around here! We're trying to accomplish something. – Thomas Edison

  377. The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all. – H. L. Mencken

  378. Most economic fallacies derive … from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another. – Milton Friedman, Economic Freedom and Representative Government; 1973

  379. Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man – in temperament, character, and capacity – and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so. – Frank Chodorov

  380. When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves. – George Pataki

  381. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. – Ronald Reagan

  382. The cure for evil and disorder is more liberty, not suppression. – Alexander Berkman

  383. Live and let live. – Friedrich von Schiller

  384. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable … – H. L. Mencken

  385. It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees. – Emiliano Zapta, Mexican revolutionary

  386. The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of human liberty, which means the future of civilization. – Henry Hazlitt

  387. Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks. – Thomas Sowell, a black sociologist, author and columnist

  388. To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. – Abraham Lincoln

  389. These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated. – Thomas Paine

  390. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. – The Declaration of Independence

  391. Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence. – Henri Frederic Amiel

  392. Liberty is always unfinished business. – Anonymous

  393. And now that the legislators and do gooders have futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems. And try liberty … – Frederic Bastiat, 1850

  394. Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hangs on the results. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the greatest historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us. – Ludwig von Mises

  395. If our country is to survive and prosper, we must summon the courage to condemn and reject the liberal agenda, and we had better do it soon. – Walter E. Williams, "The Gathering Racial Tragedy"

  396. I think we need to find out why the citizens of the world's wealthiest, most envied, most powerful country are so cynical, so distressed, so angry, so ticked of about so many things. – William J. Bennett, former Secretary of Education.

  397. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. – George Orwell, 1984

  398. Not only can no one predict the future, we don't understand the present – and there isn't even any certainty about the past. – Harry Browne

  399. A man who walks down the centre line of a road risks getting hit from both sides. – Alexander Ziatanovic

  400. It ain't so much what a man doesn't know that causes him so many problems, but what he knows that ain't so. – Will Rogers

  401. To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived – to dig deep into the actual and get something out of it – this doubtless is the right way to live. – Henry James

  402. The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. – Shakespeare

  403. Men are most apt to believe what they least understand. – Montaigne

  404. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic. – Dresden James

  405. I have thought that a man of tolerable abilities may work great changes if he first forms a good plan and makes the execution of that same plan his whole study and business. – Benjamin Franklin

  406. For all the sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, "It might have been!" – John Greenleaf Whittier

  407. It takes time to ruin a world, but time is all it takes. – Bernard DeFoutenelle

  408. People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them. – George Santayana

  409. After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of an auto accident, it makes you wonder about history. – Bits & Pieces

  410. A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know where it is today. – Robert E. Lee

  411. Ever since its founding in 1913, the Fed has described itself as an "independent" agency operated by selfless public servants striving to "fine-tune" the economy through monetary policy. In reality, however, a non-political governmental institution is as likely as a barking cat. – Thomas J. DiLorenzo

  412. I do not deny the allegation, I deny the allegator. – Jesse Jackson [!]

  413. Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk. – Bertolt Brecht

  414. The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny. – Michael Parenti

  415. Any story sounds true until someone tells the other side and sets the record straight. – Proverbs 18:17

  416. War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. – George Orwell

  417. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. – George Orwell, 1984

  418. For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade. – Noam Chomsky

  419. Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us all. – Justice William O. Douglas

  420. An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff. – Adlai Stevenson

  421. The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but the newspapers. – Thomas Jefferson

  422. When the mass media in some foreign countries serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of their government, the result is ludicrous propaganda. When the mass media in our country serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of the U.S. government, the result is responsible journalism. – Norman Solomon

  423. A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. – Second Amendment to the Constitution

  424. An armed society is a polite society. – Robert A. Heinlein

  425. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. – H L. Mencken

  426. We must remember that government, no matter how hard it tries, cannot protect an individual from themselves. This legislation is simply one more attempt by big government to tell us that they know what is best for us. It is not the first time and it will not be the last. – Peter Calcagno

  427. Washington is not America. It has become an alien city-state that rules America, and much of the rest of the world, in the way that Rome ruled the Roman Empire. – Richard Maybury

  428. How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think. – Adolf Hitler

  429. Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think. – Adolf Eichmann, Memoirs written after his 1960 capture by Israel.

  430. A man's home may be his castle, but that does not keep the government from taking it. – United States v. Hendler, 952 F2d 1364 (Fed Cir 1991)

  431. Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. – George Washington

  432. A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes – will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished. – John Stuart Mill

  433. The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. – R. J. Rummel, Death by Government

  434. A nation that expects the government to prevent churches from burning, to control the price of bread or gasoline, to secure every job, and to find some villain for every dramatic accident risks an even larger loss of life and liberty. – William A. Niskanen, For a Less Responsive Government, Cato Policy Report,

  435. The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime. – Max Stirner

  436. The pattern is as old as human life. The new rulers use more and more force, more police, more soldiers, trying to enforce more efficient control, trying to make the planned economy work by piling regulations on regulations, decree on decree. The people are hungry and hungrier. And how does a man on this earth get butter? Doesn't the government give butter? But government does not produce food from the earth; Government is guns. It is one common distinction of all civilized peoples, that they give their guns to the Government. Men in Government monopolize the necessary use of force; they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use. – Rose Wilder Lane

  437. The state is a force incarnate. Worse, it is the silly parading of force. It never seeks to prevail by persuasion. Whenever it thrusts its finger into anything it does so in the most unfriendly way. Its essence is command and compulsion. – Michael Bakunin

  438. In every State, the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces. – Michael Bakunin

  439. We are going to tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

  440. … thou shall not steal, even by majority vote … – Gary North; Conspiracy

  441. In levying taxes and in shearing sheep, it is well to stop when you get down to the skin. – Austin O'Malley

  442. Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand. They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens. – Ludwig von Mises

  443. A [tax loophole is] something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform. – Russell B. Long

  444. [S]tatism is but socialized dishonesty; it is feathering the nests of some with feathers coercively plucked from others – on the grand scale. There is no moral difference between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax or any other social program. – Leonard Read

  445. There's another major hurdle to a new year of prosperity: our tax code. No human being understands it. The current code, which runs over 8,000 pages and countless thousands more pages of IRS rulings and interpretations, is beyond redemption. ..Incalculable amounts of the nation's intellectual brainpower are devoted to the dead-end task of coping with the current tax code. Over one-half million people in the U.S. make their living off it, whether in lobbying, lawyering, tax preparing, or accounting. … Americans spend five and one-half billion hours a year filling out tax forms … and spend between $100 billion and $300 billion to comply with the current code. – Malcolm S. Forbes,

  446. In increasing numbers, Americans believe that it is the responsibility – nay, the duty – of the federal government to take the earnings of some Americans and redistribute them to other Americans for various and sundry "good" reasons including "fairness." Citizens who know it is wrong to use force to take money from a neighbor have rationalized that it is OK for the government to do it for them. – Linda Bowles, nationally syndicated columnist

  447. The average family pays more in taxes than it spends on food, clothing, and shelter combined. – Congressman Dick Armey, Why a Flat Tax? Durell Journal of Money and Banking, Spring 1995

  448. The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself. – Hilaire Belloc

  449. How ever 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, religion or all four. – Gloria Steinem, American feminist

  450. Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments … Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils.? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs. – Von Mises, Human Action

  451. The present struggle seems less about abolishing big government than about who gets to use it. – William Greider, One World Ready or Not

  452. Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains. – Jean Jacques Rosseau. The Social Contract, 1762

  453. Pugsley's First Law of Government: All government programs accomplish the opposite of what they are designed to achieve. – John Pugsley

  454. Everything government touches turns to crap. – Ringo Starr

  455. One of the things the government can't do is run anything. The only things our government runs are the post office and the railroads, and both of them are bankrupt. – Lee Iacocca

  456. With all that IMF money, the Thailand's and Mexico's are spared the consequences of their fiscal incompetence, and Wall Street's heavy hitters are spared the consequences of their stupid investments. The global economy is a rigged game, rigged so Third World politicians, rich investors and global corporations win – and U.S. taxpayers lose. – Patrick J. Buchanan

  457. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

  458. A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion. – Hugo Black

  459. If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't. – Hyman G. Rickover

  460. If we do not halt this steady process of building commissions and regulatory bodies and the special legislation like huge inverted pyramids over every one of the simple constitutional provisions, we shall soon be spending many billions of dollars more. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

  461. The proper and limited use of government is to invoke a common justice and keep the peace – and that is all. – Leonard Read

  462. I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. – Thomas Jefferson

  463. The bureaucrat's first objective, of course, is preservation of his job – provided by the big-government system, at the taxpayers expense. … Whether real world problems get solved or not is of secondary importance. It doesn't take much cynicism, in fact, to see that the bureaucrats have a vested interest in not having problems solved. If the problems did not exist (or had been invented), there would be no reason for the bureaucrat to have a job" – William Simon, former U.S Treasury Secretary

  464. What is so bad about big government? My indictment of big government is that it is bad because it attacks liberty, prosperity, progress, harmony, and morality. Thanks to big government, we have significantly less of all of those good things than we would if we had been able to keep government right-sized. Big government is cancerous. Like a cancer, it hurts the body and tends to spread, doing more and more harm as it grows. It is time for some radical surgery. – George C. Leef, director of FEE's Freeman Society Discussion Clubs

  465. Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy. – Charles Peters, How Washington Really Works

  466. We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every 10 minutes. – J. William Fulbright

  467. The era of big government is over. – Bill Clinton, State of the Union Address, January 23, 1996

  468. A tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government. – Spiro T. Agnew

  469. A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures? – Cicero

  470. You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad – in fact, to do anything it wants. – Harry Browne

  471. Once upon a time, government budgets were balanced, our money was sound, the streets were safe, and taxes imposed by all levels of government took less than 10% of our income. – Harry Browne

  472. Through an unwieldy combination of big government, big military, big business, big labor and big cities, we have created an unworkable mega-nation which defies central management and control. Not only is the United States too big, but it has also become too authoritarian and too undemocratic, and its states assume too little responsibility for the solution of their own social, economic, and political problems. – Dr. Thomas Naylor, professor emeritus of economics at Duke University

  473. The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse. – Edmund Burke

  474. Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, can never willingly abandon it. – Edmund Burke

  475. The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest "functionaire" possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work. – Frederich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

  476. Of all 36 ways to get out of trouble, the best way is – leave. – Chinese Proverb

  477. Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied. – Arthur Miller

  478. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction. – Blaise Pascal

  479. Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. – Edmund Burke

  480. A government is not legitimate merely because it exists. – Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

  481. Resistance to tyranny is service to God. – James Madison

  482. We do many things at the federal level that would be considered dishonest and illegal if done in the private sector. – Donald T. Regan

  483. [During the 20th century] … 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. – R. J. Rummel, Death by Government

  484. Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day. But a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly proves a deliberate systematic plan of reducing us to slavery. – Thomas Jefferson

  485. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. – Plato circa 400 B.C.

  486. The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. – Dresden James

  487. I am unable to accept the idea that I should be an obedient subject of a gang of corrupt, unprincipled thugs who pontificate about freedom while enslaving the population. – John Pugsley, JPJ Nov 96

  488. By the year 2012, projected outlays for entitlements and interest on the national debt will consume all tax revenues collected by the federal government … There will not be one cent left over for education, children's programs, highways, national defense, or any other discretionary program. – Bipartisan U.S. Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform

  489. Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it. – Richard Lamm, former Gov of Colorado

  490. A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property – an unpaid tax bill. – Hans F. Sennholz, Debts & Deficits

  491. There is no art which government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people. – Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

  492. The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but a swindling futurity on a large scale. – Thomas Jefferson

  493. I fear for our nation. Nearly half of our people receive some kind of government subsidy. We have grown weak from too much affluence and too little adversity. I fear that soon we will not be able to defend our country from our sure and certain enemies. We have debased our currency to the point that even the most loyal citizen no longer trusts it. – A Roman Senator in A.D. 63

  494. The Social Security system did not begin as an attempt to sabotage people's ability to plan for retirement, but it has worked out that way. The politicians who originally planned the system probably had no idea how it would turn out. But today's politicians know the system is rotted, and yet they refuse to make the changes necessary to free the American people from it. Instead, they make it worse. – Ed Clark 1980 LP presidential candidate, A New Beginning

  495. While the feds … leave Social Security off their books, the government's obligation to make benefit payments to current and near-term Social Security recipients is certainly no less real than its obligation to pay interest on its Treasury bonds. – Laurence K. Kotlikoff, Harvard Business Review, "From Deficit Delusion to Generational Accounting", May-June, 1993

  496. The one with the primary responsibility to the individual's future is that individual. – Dorcas Hardy, Director, Social Security System

  497. We should distinguish at this point between "government" and "state" … A government is the consensual organization by which we adjudicate disputes, defend our rights, and provide for certain common needs … A state on the other hand, is a coercive organization asserting or enjoying a monopoly over the use of physical force in some geographic area and exercising power over its subjects. – David Boaz

  498. Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice. – Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

  499. The thing that differentiates people from animals is money. – Gertrude Stein

  500. If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living. – Yiddish proverb

  501. Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations. – Thomas Jefferson

  502. It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses. – Winston Churchill

  503. Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable – as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead. – Friedrich von Schiller

  504. The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global economic zone, anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state. – John Perry Barlow

  505. Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior. – Allan H. Meltzer

  506. You doubt that … your great country … is on the wane? I say only this – look around you. – Saint Griseus

  507. In the United States we have, in effect, two governments … We have the duly constituted Government … Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution. – Congressman Wright Patman

  508. It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. – Henry Ford

  509. Law! What do I care about the law? Ain't I got the power? – Cornelius Vanderbilt

  510. Does America really need 70 percent of the world's lawyers? … Is it healthy for our economy to have 18 million lawsuits coursing through our system annually? – Dan Quayle August 13, 1991

  511. Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. – Martin Luther King Jr.

  512. If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! – and listens to their testimony. – James Baldwin, African-American Author, "No Name in the Street"

  513. … the next revolution … will be when those who work refuse to support those who don't. – Walter Hickel

  514. The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs. – Ludwig von Mises

  515. There are two kinds of people – those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group, there is less competition there. – Indira Gandhi

  516. Political elections do not choose leaders of society. Rather, they are an exercise in which groups of people choose individuals who will assist them in looting other groups of individuals, those folks who were unfortunate enough not to be able to elect their own political strongman. The process can be downright blatant, as is the case in African and Asian countries, or it can be relatively subtle as it is in the United States, where the trappings of "constitutionality" and "rule of law" hide many of the more nefarious goings on. – William Anderson, Are Politicians Leaders? 10/19/2000

  517. Our two-party system is a fraud, a sham, a delusion. On foreign policy, trade, immigration, Big Government, we have one-party government, one party press; and conservatives are being played for suckers. – Patrick J Buchanan

  518. Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. – Tom Lehrer

  519. Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top". – Walter E. Williams

  520. Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends. – George F. Will, Newsweek

  521. Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. – Groucho Marx

  522. Men rise from one ambition to another – first they seek to secure themselves from attack, and then they attack others. – Machiavelli

  523. This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as we do when the baby gets hold of a hammer. – Will Rogers

  524. Wherever politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by saying what people like to hear rather than what is demonstrably true. Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insincerity and mendacity. – Hans F. Sennholz

  525. Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. – John F. Kennedy

  526. 80 percent were hypocrites, 80 percent liars, 80 percent serious sinners … except of Sundays. There is always boozing and floozing … I don't have enough time to tell you everybody's name. – William Miller, Congressional doorkeeper

  527. Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs. – P.J. O'Rourke

  528. A concern for states rights, local self government and regional identity used to be taken for granted everywhere in America. But the United States is no longer, as it once was, a federal union of diverse states and regions. National uniformity is being imposed by the political class that runs Washington, the economic class that owns Wall Street and the cultural class in charge of Hollywood and the Ivy League. – Michael Hill, professor of British History, University of Alabama

  529. Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. – John Kenneth Galbraith

  530. Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him. – Charles DeGaulle

  531. Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. – Ronald Reagan

  532. Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics. – Albert Camus

  533. It may be true … that "you can't fool all the people all the time", but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country. – Will & Ariel Durant

  534. Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. – Mark Twain

  535. Politicians can't give us anything without depriving us of something else. Government is not a god. Every dime they spend must first be taken from someone else. – Gary Asmus

  536. Laws are like sausages. You sleep far better the less you know about how they are made. – Otto Von Bismark

  537. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. – Helen Keller

  538. Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. – James Madison

  539. Citizen participation [is] a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire. – Daniel P. Moynihan

  540. If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. – Henry David Thoreau

  541. Voters who live off taxpayers are the Democrats' ace in the hole. The Democrats created big programs and never let the recipients forget it. This gives them an initial advantage of tens of millions of votes in any presidential election. – Joseph Sobran

  542. The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. – Thomas Jefferson

  543. Multiple political parties are a fact of life throughout Europe and most of the West. Today the only countries without strong multiparty political systems are the United States and a number of third world military dictatorships. – Thomas H. Naylor

  544. Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing. – Bernard Baruch

  545. It is indeed a singular thing that people wish to pass laws to nullify the disagreeable consequences that the law of responsibility entails. Will they never realize that they do not eliminate these consequences but merely pass them along to other people? The result is one injustice the more and one moral the less. – Frederic Bastiat

  546. Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it. – Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

  547. The voice of the majority is no proof of justice. – Johann von Schiller

  548. 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 today, can guess what it will be like tomorrow. – James Madison, Federalist Paper #62

  549. A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady. – Voltaire

  550. An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. – Martin Luther King Jr.

  551. Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money. – Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

  552. The rule of law can be wiped out in one misguided, however well-intentioned, generation. – William T. Gossett, President ABA

  553. Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. – Benjamin Franklin

  554. The government's only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud … to protect men from foreign invaders … to settle disputes among men according to objective laws … The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly. – Ayn Rand

  555. The Constitution is not hearsay. It is not a bunch of legal myths passed along by word of mouth. It is not a depository for judicial delusions and ideological pipe dreams. It is not a figment of some justice's Marxian imagination. It is a written document – a legally binding contract whose words, spirit and intent are clear. – Linda Bowles, nationally syndicated columnist

  556. The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it. – Felix Frankfurter, Graves vs. New York; 1939

  557. We the people are the rightful master of both congress and the courts – not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. – Abraham Lincoln

  558. Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government) – Gore Vidal

  559. If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient." – Gore Vidal

  560. Going to war accelerated the move from indirect to direct rule. Almost any state that makes war finds that it cannot pay for the effort from its accumulated reserves and current revenues. Almost all war-making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat – including men – from reluctant citizens who have other uses for their resources. – Charles Tilly

  561. When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. – Plato, 347 B.C.

  562. Governments need armies to protect them from their enslaved and oppressed subjects. – Tolstoy

  563. I say one evil empire down … one to go. – Michael Moore, The Big One

  564. The laws of economics tell us that the expansion of the central state can't go on forever. Its limit is reached when the looted turn on the looters. And that's beginning to happen. More than six decades of hard work for American liberty beginning with the Old Right opposition to the Roosevelt Revolution and continuing with the Mises Institute, is beginning to bear fruit. – Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. 11-27-96

  565. The leviathan state, that monster devouring civilization in this century, is in the throes of death. This is not a wish or a prediction, but a conclusion drawn from a broad look at the trends of the last decade and a half, which, if we take the right steps, can continue on into the next century. What has happened around the world – nations states collapsing, markets outwitting planners, citizens rising up against government masters – can and is happening here at home. – Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

  566. In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant. – Charles de Gaulle

  567. No state, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union. Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy. [!] – Abraham Lincoln

  568. We protest solemnly in the face of mankind, that we desire peace at any sacrifice, save that of honor. In independence we seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the states with which we have lately been confederated. All we ask is to be let alone – that those who never held power over us shall not now attempt our subjugation by arms. This we will, we must resist to the direst extremity. The moment that this pretension is abandoned, the sword will drop from our grasp, and we shall be ready to enter into treaties of amnesty and commerce that cannot but be mutually beneficial. So long as this pretension is maintained, with a firm reliance on that Divine Power which covers with its protection the just cause, we must continue to struggle for our inherent right to freedom, independence, and self government. – President Jefferson Davis' first address to the Confederate Congress

  569. In our government-controlled schools we are taught that Lincoln was our greatest president because his war ended slavery and saved the Union. As usual, the other side of the story – the side that reflects poorly on the government – somehow gets lost. – Richard J. Maybury, The Abe Lincoln Hoax

  570. So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many many other evils … the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel. – Charles Dickens, as editor of All the Year Round, a British periodical in 1862

  571. Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right – a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. – Abraham Lincoln [!], January 12, 1848 speech in Congress

  572. Federalism is not when the central government graciously allows the states to do this or that. That is just another form of administration. True federalism is when the people of the states set limits to the central government. Fundamentally, federalism means states rights. The cause of states rights is the cause of liberty. They rise or fall together. – Clyde C. Wilson

  573. For 134 years the American people have been led to believe that the right of secession had been overturned by a "verdict of arms," but that isn't true … It is true the shot fired at Fort Sumter was a mistake since it provided the pretext for the Southland to be invaded by foreign troops, but the right of secession realized through the ballot box remains an essential part of our constitutional order. – George Kalas, Chairman Emeritus, The Southern Party

  574. The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back. – H.L. Mencken

  575. The future inhabitants of [both] the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons. We think we see their happiness in their union, and we wish it. Events may prove otherwise; and if they see their interest in separating why should we take sides? God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better. – Thomas Jefferson

  576. I expect to see trade wars, foreign policy disasters, a few race riots, a decrease in personal liberty, higher taxes, higher inflation and probably, economic collapse. The silver lining is, secession will probably become more feasible. – Charley Reese, What the next four years has in store for us column Nov. 8.1996 in Orlando Sentinal

  577. Up until the late unpleasantness of the Civil war, then, the right of secession was more or less taken for granted in many quarters, and there has never been any amendment or even a Supreme Court decision saying it's improper. – Samual Francis, Secession May Be Legal But Not Expedient, Conservative Chronicles

  578. If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. – Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address

  579. The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their Nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so … – Alex de Tocqueville, Democracy In America

  580. If [the Declaration of Independence] justifies the secession from the British empire of 3,000,000 of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of 5,000,000 of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. – New York Tribune, December 17, 1860

  581. The United States has become too big, too authoritarian, and too undemocratic. Its states assume too little responsibility for the solution of their own social, economic, and political problems. So starved for revenue are our states that they are all too willing to abdicate to the federal government their responsibilities for public education, criminal justice, employment, and environmental protection. Fine tuning or patch our badly crippled political system will do little to turn the situation around. There is only one solution to the problems of America – peaceful dissolution, not piecemeal devolution. – Thomas H. Naylor & William H. Willimon, Downsizing the U.S.A.

  582. The error is in the assumption that the General Government is a party to the constitutional compact. The States … formed the compact, acting as sovereign and independent communities. – John C. Calhoun

  583. The procedure of secession was to have an election for delegates to a state convention, to meet in convention, and to adopt ordinances of secession. This was done in accord with the Southern understanding of what would be in keeping with the United States Constitution. It had, after all, been ratified by the states acting through conventions. Could they not "un-ratify"it – secede from the Union – in the same fashion? – Clarence Carson, A Basic History Of The United States

  584. Our government is an agency of delegated and strictly limited powers. Its founders did not look to its preservation by force; but the chain they wove to bind these States together was one of love and mutual good offices … – Jefferson Davis

  585. If you would not confront your neighbor and demand his money at the point of a gun to solve every new problem that may appear in your life, you should not allow the government to do it for you. – William E. Simon

  586. A democracy is a place where numerous elections are held, at great cost, without issues, and with interchangeable candidates. – Gore Vidal

  587. Taxation with representation ain't so hot either. – Gerald Barzan

  588. Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic. – Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

  589. A few pithy slogans on guns:

    1. An armed person is a citizen. An unarmed person is a subject.
    2. A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.
    3. Six-shooter: The original point and click interface.
    4. Gun control is not about guns; it's about control.
    5. If guns are outlawed, can we use swords?
    6. If guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words.
    7. If guns cause crime, then matches cause arson.
    8. Free men do not ask permission to bear arms.
    9. If you don't know your rights, you don't have any.
    10. Those who trade liberty for security have neither.
    11. The United States Constitution (c) 1