Liberty Quotes - Page 14

A free and prosperous society has no fear of anyone entering it. But a welfare state is scared to death of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out.

Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business...because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people.

There's a huge swath of humanity that has developed verbal abilities to extract resources from guilt-ridden people.
They used to be priests, and now they're leftists.

The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.

The ones who are insane enough to think that they can rule the world are always the ones who do.

Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends

Freedom can be a state of mind, a path built independently, and with freedom comes responsibility.

I don't want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

Collectivists see the world the way Mr. Magoo did - as one big blur. They homogenize people in a communal blender, sacrificing the discrete features that make us who we are.

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.

The goal of parenting is to create self-sufficient virtues in children. Applying external pressure and punishments tends to teach them fear-based compliance rather than the internalization of moral standards.

Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.

Many rabble-rousers for libertarianism, liberty and freedom are unwitting pawns of controllers they have never even considered.

Living off others is a form of bondage - for if you take from a person his responsibility to care for himself, you also take from him the opportunity to be free.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.

Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.

Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep.