Liberty’s Quote Book
Compiled
by Patrick S. Powers
Dedicated to my beautiful wife, Jaclyn
1st Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
-Amendment I, U.S. Constitution
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
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
-Granville Hicks
I cannot assent to the view, if it be meant that the legislature may impair or abridge the rights of a free press and of free speech whenever it thinks that the public welfare requires that it be done. The public welfare cannot override constitutional privilege.
-John Marshall Harlan, Patterson v. Chicago
All national institutions
of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no
other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind,
and monopolize power and profit.
If the First Amendment
means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man,
sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he
may watch.
Censorship” is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one’s own antagonists.
-Ayn Rand
It is obvious that ‘obscenity” is not a term capable of exact legal definition in the practice of the Courts, it means ‘anything that shocks the magistrate.’
-Bertrand Russell
Most people have seen worse things in private than they pretend to be shocked at in public.
-Edgar Watson Howe
Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.
-Harry S. Truman
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
-John Stuart Mill
The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
-Justice Anthony Kennedy
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
-Virginia
I have sworn upon the
altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over
the mind of man.
The First and Fourteenth Amendments say that Congress and the states shall make “no law” which abridges freedom of speech or of the press. In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that “no law” does not mean what it says, that “no law” is qualified to mean “some” laws. I cannot take this step.
-William O. Douglas
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
2nd Amendment
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.
-Amendment II, U.S. Constitution
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
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
I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.
-George Mason
Suppose the Second amendment said "A well-educated electorate being necessary for self-governance in a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed." Is there anyone who would suggest that means only registered voters have a right to read?
-Robert Levy
Criminals obey "gun control" laws in the same manner politicians follow their oaths of office.
-Unknown
Laws that forbid the carrying of arms, disarm only those who are neither inclined, nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants. They serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
-Thomas Jefferson
The Second Amendment is the Equal Rights Amendment.
-Jannalee Tobias
Those who beat their swords into plough shares shall plough for those who don't.
-Anonymous
Arms are the only true badge of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave.
-Andrew Fletcher
[We] should not blame a gun itself for any crime or any acts of violence, any more than we can blame a pen for misspelling a word.
-Senator Wallace F. Bennett (R-UT), Congressional Record
Gun Control Slogans:
An armed person is a citizen. An unarmed person is a subject.
A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.
Gun control is not about guns; it's about control.
If guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words.
64,999,987 firearm owners killed no one yesterday.
The constitutions of most
of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people;
that... it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.
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
We should not forget that the spark which ignited the American Revolution was caused by the British attempt to confiscate the firearms of the colonists.
-Patrick Henry
I don’t like the idea that the police department seems bent on keeping a pool of unarmed victims available for the predation of the criminal class.
-David Mohler
The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.
-Thomas Jefferson
Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don’t have a gun, freedom of speech has no power.
-Yoshimi Ishikawa
Firearms are second only
to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's
teeth.
The very atmosphere of
firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference - they
deserve a place of honor with all that's good.
The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does derive it from the State government. It is one of the “high powers” delegated directly to the citizen, and ‘is excepted out of the general powers of government.’ A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power.
-Cockram vs. State
The maintenance of the right to bear arms is a most essential one to every free people and should not be whittled down by technical constructions.
-State vs. Kerner
To prohibit a citizen from wearing or carrying a war arm…is an unwarranted restriction upon the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of constitutional privilege.
-Wilson vs. State
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
Expecting a carjacker or rapist or drug pusher to care that his possession or use of a gun is unlawful is like expecting a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces.
-Joseph T. Chew
4th Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
-Amendment IV, U.S. Constitution
There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.
– Antonin Scalia, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Arizona v. Hicks
The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.
A
system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also
lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes
complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to
time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is
confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do
go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its
servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and
enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption
that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all
both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced.
That
general warrants, whereby an officer or messenger may be commanded to
search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to
seize any person or persons not named, or whose offense is not
particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and
oppressive, and ought not to be granted.
-Virginia
Declaration of Rights
The
poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the
Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow
through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of
England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of
the ruined tenement!
-William
Pitt, Earl of Chatham
5th Amendment
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
-Amendment V, U.S. Constitution
The 5th Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. one of the great landmarks in men's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.
-William O. Douglas
Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public.
-Justice Sandra Day O’connor
Your combined property tax is $10,000. A nursing home proprietor tells city officials that if they condemn your property and sell it to him to build a nursing home, the city would get $30,000 in property taxes. According to last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling, this plan would be construed as beneficial to the public, and you'd have no recourse. Similarly, an environmental group might descend on public officials to condemn your land and transfer it to the group for a wildlife preserve. Again, a contrived public benefit for which you'd have no recourse.
-Walter Williams
Now
can there be any liberty where property is taken away without
consent?
-James
Otis
The
sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so
apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes.
-Thomas Jefferson
10th Amendment
If the Tenth Amendment were still taken seriously, most of the federal government's present activities would not exist. That's why no one in Washington ever mentions it.
-Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That "all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people..." To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.
-Thomas Jefferson
Whenever the General Government assumes undelegatedpowers,its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.
-Thomas Jefferson
It [is] inconsistent with the principles of civil liberty, and contrary to the natural rights of the other members of the society, that any body of men therein should have authority to enlarge their own powers... without restraint.
-Thomas Jefferson
-James Madison
I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country, and the least encroachment of those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil.
-Ben Franklin
Association
I
never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply
because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want
to meet them.
If we could see only the individual and not groups of individuals, it wouldn’t matter whom people associated with as long as no force or prohibitions were imposed by government.
-Ron Paul
Anarchy is not chaos, but order without control.
-David Layson
The black groups that boycott certain films would do better to get the money together to make the films they want to see, or stay in church and leave us to our work.
The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.
-Alexis De Tocqueville
It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.
-Robert Nozick
Bipartisanship
If two parties with two sets of bad ideas cooperate, the result is not good policy but policy that is extremely bad.
-Ron Paul
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
-Thomas Carlyle
The word bipartisan means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.
-George Carlin
As a rule of thumb, Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.
-Thomas Sowell
Voters definitely believe Washington is corrupt—but most think it’s bipartisan.
-Chuck Todd
Bureaucracy
The key characteristics of bureaucrats are these: first, they spend other people's money; second, they have a bottom line, a proof of success, that is very distant and difficult to define. Under those conditions, a major incentive for every bureaucrat is to become more powerful--and this is true whether the bureaucrat is dominated by broad and unselfish interests or by narrow and selfish interests. In either case, being more powerful will enable the bureaucrat to pursue those interests more effectively.
-Milton and Rose Friedman
The bureaucrat's first objective, of course, is preservation of his job – provided by the big-government system, at the taxpayer’s 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
You will never understand
bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is
everything and outcomes are nothing.
A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.
-Fred Allen
What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.
-Richard Harkness
My observation is that
whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty...
it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if
three or more are employed therein.
Business
The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.
-Ludwig von Mises
Profit is a signal that valuable services are being rendered to people on a voluntary basis.
If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as "social gains", if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as "selfish greed".
- Ayn Rand
Entrepreneurial profit is
the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to
production.
If there is any proof of a man’s incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary.
-Ayn Rand
Asking “who ought to be the boss” is like asking “Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet”; obviously, the man who can sing tenor.
-Henry Ford
There is only one boss—the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
-Sam Walton
Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.
-Stanley Marcus
When you hire people that are smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are.
-R.H. Grant
Capitalism
And
while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the
individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival
of the fittest in every department.
One of the most misleading terms used by people on both sides of many economic and social issues is the “the market.” This word creates the impression of some kind of impersonal mechanism, when it is as personal as the people in it. The market is nothing more and nothing less than many people competing with one another, and making voluntary transactions with each other, on such terms as are mutually agreeable.
-Thomas Sowell
Agriculture is the first step toward civilization, because it requires a significant advance in men’s conceptual development: it requires that they grasp two cardinal concepts which the perceptual, concrete-bound mentality of the hunters could not grasp fully: time and savings. Once you grasp these, you have grasped the three essentials of human survival: time-savings-production.
-Ayn Rand
America's abundance was created not 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. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
-Ayn Rand
In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade. In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined—not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone’s “greed” or by anyone’s need—but by the law of supply and demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and decisions made by all the participants. Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values—better products or services, at a lower price—than others are able to offer.
-Ayn Rand
A depression is a large scale decline in production and trade…there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event.
-Nathaniel Branden
Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven’t had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It’s not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate taxes, privileged government contracts to the military-industrial complex and a foreign policy controlled by corporate interest and overseas investments. Add to this centralized federal management of farming, education, medicine, insurance, banking and welfare. This is not capitalism!
-Ron Paul
The distribution of income under capitalism is an expression of the general belief that it is better for society to be shaped by the interplay of people’s free opinions and free preferences than by the enforcement of any one set of values by government.
-Irving Kristol
One of the wonderful things about free markets is that the path to greater wealth comes not from looting, plundering and enslaving one's fellow man, as it has throughout most of human history, but by serving and pleasing him.
-Walter Williams
We might think of dollars as being "certificates of performance." The better I serve my fellow man, and the higher the value he places on that service, the more certificates of performance he gives me. The more certificates I earn, the greater my claim on the goods my fellow man produces. That's the morality of the market. In order for one to have a claim on what his fellow man produces, he must first serve him. Contrast that moral standard to Congress' standing offer, "Vote for me and I'll take what your fellow man produces and give it to you.
-Walter Williams
Civil Disobedience
There
are some events in society to which human laws cannot extend; but
when applied to them, lose all their force and efficacy. In
short, when human laws contradict or discountenance the means which
are necessary to preserve the essential rights of any society, the
defeat the property ends of all laws, and so become null and
void.
-Alexander
Hamilton
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 …
– John Locke
I discharge every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.
-Thomas Jefferson
A legislative act contrary to the constitution is not law.
-Justice John Marshall
One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws, but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
-Martin Luther King Jr.
Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also prison.
-Henry David Thoreau
If
a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is
obligated to do so.
-Thomas Jefferson
Coercion
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
-H.L. Mencken
Liberals love to say things like, "We're just asking everyone to pay their fair share." But government is not about asking. It is about telling. The difference is fundamental. It is the difference between making love and being raped, between working for a living and being a slave. The Internal Revenue service is not asking anybody to do anything. It confiscates your assets and puts you behind bars if you don't pay.
-Thomas Sowell
What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.
-Ayn Rand
The "private sector" of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and...the "public sector" is, in fact, the coercive sector.
-Henry Hazlitt
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
The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.
-Mark Skousen
What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.
-Ayn Rand
If we wish to preserve a
free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability
of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of
coercion.
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion...
-Ayn Rand
A man may well bring a horse to water but he cannot make him drink.
-John Heywood
The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.
-F.A. Hayek
The common denominator in all government activity is the use of force: Government either forces you to do things, forces you not to do things, or forces you to pay for things.
-Doug Newman
Communism
The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects – his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.
-Henry Hazlitt
What is a communist? One
who has yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings.
Idler,
or bungler, or both, he is willing
To fork over his penny and
pocket your shilling.
-Unknown
-Unknown
-Thomas Sowell
We are not without accomplishment. We have managed to distribute poverty equally.
-Nguyen Co Thatch, Vietnamese Foreign Minister
There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.
-Robert Nozick
Corruption
The
time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall
have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of
the fold than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall
have entered.
-Thomas
Jefferson
A properly sized government would solve most of the problems dealing with immoral and outrageous lobbyists’ power. There would be less on the table to purchase.
-Ron Paul
An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods.
-Ambrose Bierce
It is just as important that business keep out of government as that government keep out of business.
-Herbert Hoover
The bedfellows politics made are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship.
-Marcel Achard
When you spread food out on a picnic table, you can expect ants. When you put $3 trillion on the table, you can expect special interests, lobbyists and pork-barrel politicians.
-David Boaz
The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.
-Bess Myerson
Crime
If people who are poor hold the view that poverty is not their own fault but the fault of society at large, then it is perfectly understandable that their reaction is "Since society is responsible for my poverty, I have every right to act against society and to take what I need or want." Similarly, if they come to believe that the well-to-do whom they see on TV, or obverse in high-income neighborhoods, are well-to-do not because of their own efforts-not because they worked hard or saved or in some way contributed to society-but simply because they happened to draw winning tickets in a social lottery, then it is easy to understand their believing that nothing is wrong in correcting the outcome of that lottery by taking property from others.
-Milton Friedman
I am not here debating the merits of the death penalty. There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.
-Dinesh D'souza
The premise of the articles was that it was highly ironic and troubling that more Americans were in prison than ever before at a time when violent crime rates were shrinking. It never seemed to occur to the editors that maybe violent crime rates were shrinking because many of the criminals were locked up!
-Dinesh D'souza
Nothing is more destructive of respect for 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 related with this.
-Albert Einstein
Democracy
Popular
suffrage is no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves
in to slavery.
-Frank
Chodorov
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
-George Bernard Shaw
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
-Michael Crichton
Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%.
-Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
-F.A. Hayek
Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.
-Walter Williams
A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
-Alex De Tocqueville
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.
-Alan Coren
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
-Winston Churchil