Liberty Quotes - Page 17

Freedom is the brevity to resist detrimental act.

Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.

LIBERTY! FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY!True anyhow no matter how manyLiars use those words.

Every socialist is a disguised dictator.

For the primary goal of the American Revolution which transferred American life and introduced a new era in human history, was not the overthrow or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption of the constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty.

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.

Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god.

There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.

Perhaps worse still is what liberal societies might do to themselves in the face of this new and different threat [of terrorism]. They begin, by small but dangerous increments, to cease to be as liberal as they once were. They begin to restrict their own hard-won rights and freedoms as a protection against the crminial minority who attempt (and as we thus see, by forcing liberty to commit suidcide, succed in doing) to terrorise society.

The idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can’t create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept.

Once freedom lights its beacon in a man's heart the gods are powerless against him.

What makes anyone think that government officials are even trying to protect us? A government is not analogous to a hired security guard. Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime. Yes, rulers have sometimes come to recognize the prudence of protecting the herd they are milking and even of improving its ‘infrastructure’ until the day they decide to slaughter the young bulls, but the idea that government officials seek to promote my interests or yours is little more than propaganda—unless, of course, you happen to belong to the class of privileged tax eaters who give significant support to the government and therefore receive in return a share of the loot.

Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

So long as you do not achieve social liberty, whatever freedom is provided by the law is of no avail to you.

Meanwhile, allow me to be me ….in all forms.

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

When a basic human need becomes a taboo, it is only a matter of time before it turns into a hideous industry.

Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.

There is only a certain amount of wealth in the world, this thinking goes. Economics is a matter of acquiring and allocating, not creating. This was the view of the world’s smartest people, all top philosophers and not stupid people, for many thousands of years before the age of the enlightenment. It still is.

. . . The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.

The time when freedom is no longer held in the highest regard is not during times of want or suffering, but during the era of civility, pleasure, and wealth.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

History is the same story with different costumes.

Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.

Liberty creates an environment where all living beings within a society have an equal opportunity to exercise freedom. An equal opportunity to exercise freedom would further infer that, in liberty, living beings have equal access to knowledge and experience. Knowledge and experience are both inseparable from freedom. Liberty is balanced societal freedom and may also be considered balanced knowledge and experience. With equal access to knowledge and experience, living beings have an equal opportunity to enhance their abilities. Liberty is perceived as true freedom because it maximizes the opportunities for most living beings within a society.

Sweetest of all is liberty. This we have chosen and this we pay for. We have embraced the laws of Lykurgus, and they are stern laws. They have schooled us to scorn the life of leisure, which this rich land of ours would bestow upon us if we wished, and instead to enroll ourselves in the academy of discipline and sacrifice. Guided by these laws, our fathers for twenty generations have breathed the blessed air of freedom and have paid the bill in full when it was presented. We, their sons, can do no less.

Liberty and Freedom are complex concepts. They go back to religious ideas of Free Will and are related to the Ruler Mystique implicit in absolute monarchs. Without absolute monarchs patterned after the Old Gods and ruling by the grace of a belief in religious indulgence, Liberty and Freedom would never have gained their present meaning. These ideals owe their very existence to past examples of oppression. And the forces that maintain such ideas will erode unless renewed by dramatic teaching or new oppressions. This is the most basic key to my life.

A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century

Faith and freedom is great, but it gets nowhere without faith in freedom.

Every soul craves to fill the void. Only God can satisfy and set us free.

For two decades the state has been taking liberties and these liberties were once ours.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

Government leaders are amazing. So often it seems they are the last to know what the people want.

Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.

Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress ofcorpses.

In the old Republican days the subject of slavery and of the saving of the Union made appeals to the consciences and liberty-loving instincts of the people. These later years have been full of talk about commerce and dinner pails, but I feel sure that the American conscience and the American love of liberty have not been smothered. They will break through this crust of sordidness and realize that those only keep their liberties who accord liberty to others.

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves

The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.

You speak as though they cannot be trusted with freedom to build a future for themselves, given the opportunity. Certainly humanity as a whole shares a collective guilt for incompetency in crafting a decent future for ourselves – more often than not, we seem eager to destroy others for our own selfish gain. If you truly care for their prospects once freed, then raise a voice and a hand towards that cause! But do not condemn those who work towards the step that must be accomplished first. Liberty first must be achieved, before anything else can have any meaning. - Jo March to Kate Vaughn, on the abolition of slavery

From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty

Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

An oligarchy does not require a good and moral citizenry but a Constitutional Republic does. If we lose our moral compass, we lose our country.

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.

It must be remembered that a vast majority of mankind’s history has been spent living under the rule of tyrants and authoritarians. The ideas of Liberty are very new when you consider the big picture. By contrast, various forms of socialism and fascism have been adopted over and over again. Be wary of those who try to present these old and tired ideas as something new and exciting. Liberty and free markets are the way forward if we truly desire peace and prosperity.

We don't permit anyone to tell us our business, nor do we wish to tell anyone his. The same goes for moral outlooks. Don't tread on us and we won't on you. We're a tolerant, liberty-loving bunch, we Wolfes.

If you spend time with crazy and dangerous people, remember – their personalities are socially transmitted diseases; like water poured into a container, most of us eventually turn into – or remain – whoever we surround ourselves with. We can choose our tribe, but we cannot change that our tribe is our destiny.

Liberty will never yield equality. Freewill produces a mess that you either accept or reject in favor of slavery.

If you are going to hide yourself and you will not stand against the work of the bad people, you have given them an endorsement.

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

The price of liberty is labor as well as vigilance.

Centralization is an abomination! Decentralize everything! Leave nothing to the central planners.

To educate man is to give him a liberty for life.

The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.

The first people to get the new money are the counterfeiters, which they use to buy various goods and services. The second receivers of the new money are the retailers who sell those goods to the counterfeiters. And on and on the new money ripples out through the system, going from one pocket or till to another. As it does so, there is an immediate redistribution effect. For first the counterfeiters, then the retailers, etc. have new money and monetary income they use to bid up goods and services, increasing their demand and raising the prices of the goods that they purchase. But as prices of goods begin to rise in response to the higher quantity of money, those who haven't yet received the new money find the prices of the goods they buy have gone up, while their own selling prices or incomes have not risen. In short, the early receivers of the new money in this market chain of events gain at the expense of those who receive the money toward the end of the chain, and still worse losers are the people (e.g., those on fixed incomes such as annuities, interest, or pensions) who never receive the new money at all.

In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.

People ask me what I am politically and I've previously offered this equation: I became a conservative by being around liberals. And I became a libertarian after being around conservatives.

Government programs didn’t arise because the people demanded them or because the free market was unable to provide needed services. They arose because the politicians found them to be a convenient way to buy votes with other people’s money, a convenient way to enlarge their own power, a convenient way to reward their political cronies, and a convenient way to keep people dependent on government.