Explore the wonderful quotes under this tag
The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
Sep 10, 2025
Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.
A tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government.
If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.
Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.
The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
If you feel driven to feed the poor, get your checkbook out and keep your tyrannical mouth shut about it.
Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.
The greatest productive force is human selfishness.
The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.
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.
A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property - an unpaid tax bill.
The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
No nation was ever ruined by trade.
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
Self-interest is not myopic selfishness. It is whatever it is that interests the participants, whatever they value, whatever goals they pursue. The scientist seeking to advance the frontiers of his discipline, the missionary seeking to convert infidels to the true faith, the philanthropist seeking to bring comfort to the needy - all are pursuing their interests, as they see them, as they judge them by their own values.
Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.
It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.
Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.
Political correctness is tyranny with manners.
If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.
The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.
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.
Form 1040 was chosen by the IRS because for every $50 you earn, you get 10 and they get 40.
Not only can no one predict the future, we don't understand the present - and there isn't even any certainty about the past.
A politician who commends himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to do good with other peoples' money.
If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as "social gains", if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as "selfish greed".
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.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.
The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom...
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.
The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced. If the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt, people must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
I am just absolutely convinced that the best formula for giving us peace and preserving the American way of life is freedom, limited government, and minding our own business overseas.
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.
How ever sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, religion or all four.
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine.
Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.