Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Jefferson

I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude

Thomas Jefferson

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.

Thomas Jefferson

Without virtue, happiness cannot be.

Thomas Jefferson

Dependence leads to subservience.

Robert Higgs

All nonstate threats to life, liberty, and property appear to be relatively petty and therefore can be dealt with. Only states can pose truly massive threats, and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind invariably come to pass.

Tammy Bruce

As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought.

Tacitus

The word liberty has been falsely used by persons who, being degenerately profligate in private life, and mischievous in public, had no hope left but in fomenting discord.

Tacitus

Corruptisima republica plurimae leges.

Robert Nozick

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.

Robert Nozick

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Thomas Paine

The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax

Thomas Sowell

We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.

Thomas Sowell

There is no talent so ardently supported, nor generously rewarded, as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.

Thomas Sowell

There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.

Thomas Sowell

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

Richard Lovelace

Fishes that tipple in the deep, Know no such liberty.

Rush Limbaugh

It's beyond me how anybody can look at these protestors and call them anything other than what they are: anti-American, anticapitalist, pro-Marxist communists.

Rush Limbaugh

Whatever you want to call it, socialism, liberalism, this is who they are. They corrupt everything. Folks, their targets are the institutions and traditions that have given the world its morality, its virtue. The institutions and traditions which have defined freedom and liberty. That's what the left attacks.

Thomas Merton

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

Thomas B. Macaulay

None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.

Thomas B. Macaulay

And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?

Thomas Hobbes

I know not how the world will receive it, nor how it may reflect on those that shall seem to favor it. For in a way beset with those that contend, on one side for too great Liberty , and on the other side for too much Authority , 'tis hard to passe between the points of both unwounded.

Thomas Hobbes

Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Thomas Hobbes

What reason is there that he which laboreth much, and, sparing the fruits of his labor, consumeth little, should be more charged than he that, living idly, getteth little and spendeth all he gets, seeing the one hath no more protection from the commonwealth than the other?

Thomas Hobbes

Subjects have no greater liberty in a popular than in a monarchial state. That which deceives them is the equal participation of command.

Thomas Hobbes

There are very few so foolish that they had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others.

Thomas Jefferson

That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone.

Thomas Jefferson

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.

Thomas Friedman

Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.

Victor Hugo

When liberty returns, I will return.

Walt Whitman

Liberty is to be subserved, whatever occurs.

Sarah Fielding

But in all things whether we shall make only a due use of the liberties we have asked, is left entirely to the judicious reader to decide.

Roger Scruton

[Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.