Famous Quotes & Sayings

Moliere

It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.

Milton Friedman

I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.

Milton Friedman

The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.

Milton Friedman

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.

Milton Friedman

Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances.

Milton Friedman

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

Milton Friedman

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

Milton Friedman

Economic freedom is ... an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.

Milton Friedman

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

H. G. Wells

The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.

H. L. Mencken

I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom ... the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.

H. L. Mencken

Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.

H. L. Mencken

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

H. L. Mencken

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.

H. L. Mencken

Remorse-Regret that one waited so long to do it.

H. L. Mencken

Liberals have many tails and chase them all.

H. L. Mencken

Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.

H. L. Mencken

I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.

H. L. Mencken

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.

H. L. Mencken

Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

H. L. Mencken

I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.

H. L. Mencken

Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate...Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.

H. L. Mencken

I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

H. L. Mencken

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

H. L. Mencken

What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.

H. L. Mencken

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

H. L. Mencken

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

H. L. Mencken

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

H. L. Mencken

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

H. L. Mencken

the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.

H. L. Mencken

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

H. L. Mencken

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.