John Locke
Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.
P.J. O'Rourke
- The Liberty Manifesto
It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.
Frank Chodorov
The early American knew that freedom was nothing more than the absence of external restraint on behavior; the government could not give you freedom, it could only take it away.
Thomas Sowell
If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.
James Fenimore Cooper
Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.
Thomas Sowell
Mystical references to "society" and its programs to "help" may warm the hearts of the gullible, but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
Ron Crickenberger
If the government can't keep drugs away from inmates who are locked in steel cages, surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, drug-tested, strip-searched, X-rayed, and videotaped - how can it possibly stop the flow of drugs to an entire nation?
Joseph Sobran
Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.
Stuart K. Hayashi
In order to prevent democracy from becoming a tyranny over minorities, individual rights must supersede all democratic voting and all regulations. Rights must come first. Laws should come second, and only to protect those rights; nothing more.
Frederic Bastiat
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
Anonymous
Libertarianism is the philosophy which says that you can run your life better than the government can, and you have the right to be left alone in order to do it.
Ron Crickenberger
The War on Drugs is a price support system for terrorists and drug pushers. It turns ordinary, cheap plants like marijuana and poppies into fantastically lucrative black market products. Without the War on Drugs, the financial engine that fuels terrorist organizations would sputter to a halt.
Herbert Spencer
The liberty the citizen enjoys is to be measured not by governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the paucity of restraints it imposes upon him.
John Ruskin
One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said "Let him touch it." So I touched it - and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty.
Wendell Phillips
No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents.
Lord George Lyttleton
To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused.
D.H. Lawrence
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.
Gerald W. Johnson
We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear - unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called "the insolence of elected persons" - in word, free men.
Robert H. Jackson
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy. One's right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly may not be submitted to vote; they depend on no elections.
Robert H. Jackson
It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.
