Thoughts
From Robert Higgs
If we are ever to attain a free society, we must persuade a great many of our fellows that it is simply wrong for any individuals or groups, by violence or the threat thereof, to impose their demands on others who have committed no crime and violated no ones just rights, and that it is just as wrong for the persons who compose the state to do so as it is for you and me.
2013-01-03 at 06:19:36
From Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to the secret of liberty.
2012-12-28 at 14:05:11
From David Kelley
A free society, by nature, is an individualist society. It leaves people free to pursue their own interests, through voluntary trade with others, and leaves them responsible for choosing their own course in life. A free society allows, encourages, and even depends on people who can define the values that give their lives meaning, and then pursue these values autonomously. It relies on people who are entrepreneurs in their own lives, who are capable of thinking for themselves, who have a sense of self-ownership, and the drive to make the most of themselves and their opportunities.
2012-12-14 at 14:30:39
More From H.L. Mencken
The state -- or, to make matters more concrete, the government -- consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can not get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods.
2012-12-11 at 12:37:09
From Margaret Mead
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
2012-11-15 at 01:11:03
From Frank Chodorov
The citizen is sovereign only when he can retain and enjoy the fruits
of his labor. If the government has first claim on his property he
must learn to genuflect before it. When the right of property is
abrogated, all the other rights of the individual are undermined, and
to speak of the sovereign citizen who has no absolute right to
property is to talk nonsense. It is like saying that the slave is
free because he is allowed to do anything he wants to do ( even vote,
if you wish ) except to own what he produces.
2012-11-12 at 21:37:22
From Chris Hedges
Our masters rely on our labor to make them wealthy, on our children
for cannon fodder in war and on our collective chants for adulation.
They would otherwise happily slip us rat poison. When they retreat
into their inner sanctums, which they keep hidden from public view,
they speak in the cold words of manipulation, power and privilege,
words that expose their visions of themselves as entitled and
beyond the reach of morality or law.
2012-11-11 at 05:27:37
From Philip Giraldi
We are seeing a series of wars unprecedented in scope that are carefully
being disguised as non-wars, or, at best, limited objective constabulary
actions, while the definition of terrorist has become increasingly elastic,
permitting the listing of anyone who supports in any way or condones the
activities of any group viewed as threatening to American interests.
2012-11-10 at 13:42:46
More From Lord Acton
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
2012-11-08 at 13:21:19
From Justice Robert H. Jackson
Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective
weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government. Among deprivations
of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the
spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart.
2012-11-07 at 14:36:58
From William Dale
Nearly every reform proposal offered to fix "the health-care crisis" calls
for increased governmental control of medicine. These proposals are the
logical result of the belief that there is a "right" to medical care. But
there is no such right. Rights, properly understood, do not include an
entitlement to the services of others.
2012-10-31 at 00:48:25
More Wisdom From Anthony Gregory
The way I see it, war is the most important issue, if anything is. It
endangers American lives, destroys foreign lives by the thousands and
millions, wrecks nations, fosters resentment, costs trillions of dollars,
unleashes unspeakable property damage, and has historically served as
cover for more attacks on economic and civil liberty than all other factors
combined. So long as the U.S. is at perpetual war, domestic liberty is
an impossible dream. What both candidates said last night was: America,
you might as well give up on freedom for another four years at least.
2012-10-28 at 17:30:00
From Suprem Court Justice David Davis
The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally
in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes
of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving
more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than
that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great
exigencies of government.
2012-10-19 at 17:25:51
From Bruce D. Porter
Instead of liberty, the favorite watchword has become liberation. Under this banner march the tyrannies of our time, from Soviet Russia with its wars of national liberation to the kaleidoscope of coercive political programs in America which invoke the mirage of liberation. The twentieth century has been a century of liberation -- of a war on freedom fought in the name of freedom. The irony of Americas present course is that in the name of freedom from restraints, every source of independent power and morality is being undermined; in the name of freedom from work, want, and scarcity, the constitutional framework of liberty is being dismantled, attacked, and perverted past recognition. Beyond the irony stands the very real tragedy that in the name of freedom we are being led inexorably toward oppression and slavery.
2012-10-19 at 14:01:01
From William Leggett
Whenever a Government assumes the power of discriminating between the
different classes of the community, it becomes, in effect, the arbiter
of their prosperity, and exercises a power not contemplated by any
intelligent people in delegating their sovereignty to their rulers. It then
becomes the great regulator of the profits of every species of industry,
and reduces men from dependence on their own exertions, to a dependence
on the caprices of their Government. Governments possess no delegated
right to tamper with individual industry a single hairs-breadth beyond
what is essential to protect the rights of person and property.
2012-10-08 at 21:57:34