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People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.
Author: Frederic Bastiat
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A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it -- it keeps him upright.
Author: Robert Heinlein
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The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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...economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'etre to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man's innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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Government is beating into submission, imprisoning, and killing...The authority of man-made law is entirely due to weapons of the constables who enforce obedience to its provisions.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous.
Author: Richard Mitchell
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The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
Author: Albert Jay Nock
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The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.
Author: Albert Jay Nock
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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.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law.
Author: Robert Heinlein
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It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.
Author: Primo Levi
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We vote too much. We deliberate too little. We have brought within the scope of the federal jurisdiction a vast number of subjects that do not belong here, but are nevertheless here. What we need to do is to stop passing laws. We have enough laws now to govern the world for the next ten thousand years.
Author: James Alexander Reed
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One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.
Author: Thomas Brackett Reed
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To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
Author: Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.
Author: James Wilson
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One can become a leader only if one is supported by an ideology which makes other people tractable and accommodating.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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The modern definition of 'racist' is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal.
Author: Peter Brimelow
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The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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It is the nature of slavery to render its victims so abject that at last, fearing to be free, they multiply their own chains. You can liberate a freeman, but you cannot liberate a slave.
Author: Louis J. Halle
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If none were to have Liberty but those who understand what it is, there would not be many freed Men in the world.
Author: Lord Halifax
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When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty.
Author: George Mason
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Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what has worked with what sounded good. In area after area- crime, education, housing, race relations- the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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What is politically defined as economic "planning" is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by government officials.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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Men resort to talking only when they haven't the power to enforce their convictions upon others.
Author: Lin Yutang
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It is precisely those things which belong to "the people" which have historically been despoiled- wild creatures, the air, and waterways being notable examples. This goes to the heart of why property rights are socially important in the first place. Property rights mean self-interested monitors. No owned creatures are in danger of extinction. No owned forests are in danger of being leveled. No one kills the goose that lays the golden egg when it is his goose.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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...the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to the flag, a leader, a religious faith or political conviction.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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It can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime.
Author: Albert Jay Nock
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To say that a farm boy knows how to milk a cow is to say that we can send him out to the barn with an empty pail and expect him to return with milk. To say that a criminologist understands crime is not to say that we can send him out with a grant or a law and expect him to return with a lower crime rate. He is more likely to return with a report on why he has not succeeded yet, and including the inevitable need for more money, a larger staff, more sweeping powers, etc.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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I think most historians will agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy, or correct ideology.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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Nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom.
Author: Rudolph Rummel
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Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.
Author: Rudolph Rummel
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The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking power. This means to foster democratic freedom.
Author: Rudolph Rummel
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For the sake of domestic peace, liberalism aims at democratic government. Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary it is the very means of preventing revolution and civil wars. It provides a method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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The essence of democracy is not that everyone makes and administers laws but that lawgivers and rulers should be dependent on the people's will in such a way that they may be peaceably changed if conflict occurs.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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If the small minority of enlightened citizens who are able to conceive sound principles of political management do not succeed in winning the support of their fellow citizens and converting them to the endorsement of policies that bring and preserve prosperity, the cause of mankind and civilization is hopeless. There is no other means to safeguard a propitious development of human affairs than to make the masses of inferior people adopt the ideas of the elite. This has to be achieved by convincing them. It cannot be accomplished by a despotic regime that instead of enlightening the masses beats them into submission. In the long run the ideas of the majority, however detrimental they may be, will carry on. The future of mankind depends on the ability of the elite to influence public opinion in the right direction.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy,' and the other, 'tyranny.'.
Author: Karl Popper
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To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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To complain of lack of leadership is, in the field of political affairs, the characteristic attitude of all harbingers of dictatorship.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit.
Author: P.j. O'rourke
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The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.
Author: P.j. O'rourke
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Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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The celebration of unbounded individualism means, beyond some point, the acceptance of force- either private (crime, riot, vigilanteism) or public (authoritarianism).
Author: Thomas Sowell
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Freedom...refer[s] to a social relationship among people- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption.Vitality springs from diversity- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces- alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations.
Author: B.h. Liddell Hart
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