Individual Liberty Quotes

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.

Although the free market is clearly the antithesis of state control of the economy, such as fascists advocate, the left-right dichotomy makes it seem as if fascists are just more extreme versions of “conservatives,” in the same sense in which socialism is a more extreme version of the welfare state. But this vision of a symmetrical political spectrum corresponds to no empirical reality. Those who advocate the free market typically do so as just one aspect of a more general vision in which government’s role in the lives of individuals is to be minimized, within limits set by a need to avoid anarchy and a need to maintain military defense against other nations.

There is only one kind of freedom and that's individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.

Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group - whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called 'the common good'.

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.

… the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions…. Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.

Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force - and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism.

Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism. Not only are they compatible, but you can't really have one without the other. True anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will be anarchism

True liberalism seeks all legitimate freedom first in the confident belief that without such freedom the pursuit of all other blessings and benefits is vain. That belief is the foundation of all American progress, political as well as economic.

I've long believed that one of the mainsprings of our own liberty has been the widespread ownership of property among our people and the expectation that anyone's child, even from the humblest of families, could grow up to own a business or a corporation. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of a land of small farmers, of shopowners, and merchants. Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Homestead Act that ensured that the great western prairies of America would be the realm of independent, propertyowning citizens-a mightier guarantee of freedom is difficult to imagine.

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.

I mean, I've always been a libertarian. Leave everybody alone. Let everybody else do what they want. Just stay out of everybody else's hair.

If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication. Then, no law should permit those democratic processes to be set at nought.

All I claim, all I plead for, is liberty of thought and expression. That is all. I do not pretend to tell what is absolutely true, but what I think is true. I do not pretend to tell all the truth..

A government of laws, not of men.

If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real world he must also have the right to sustain his life by grappling with and transforming resources; he must be able to own the ground and the resources on which he stands and which he must use. In short, to sustain his human right.

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please.

When government gets too big, freedom is lost. Government is supposed to be the servant. But when a government can tax the people with no limit or restraint on what the government can take, then the government has become the master.

Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.

Faith comes not by compulsion, but it is a matter of free choice; therefore, no one has the authority to compel anyone else in such matters, nor to coerce him with new laws

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. This program [Medicare] I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day, we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don't do this [write letters and call members of Congress], and if I don't do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.