Quotes
A negative deed destroys a thousand good words."
-Eli Herring
There’s only one way to abolish war, and that’s to abolish government.
-Jim Davies, THE ON LINE FREEDOM ACADEMY, Segment 10, Sec. 4.
There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience.
-French Proverb
The power [of coining money] itself is a frivolous one, of little or no utility; for the weighing and assaying of metals is a thing so easily done, and can be done by so many different persons, that there is certainly no necessity for it being done at all by a government,. And it would undoubtedly have been far better if all coins - whether coined by governments or individuals - had all been made into pieces bearing simply the names of pounds, ounces, pennyweights, etc., and containing just the amounts of pure metal described by those weights. The coins would have then been regarded as only so much metal; and as having only the same value as the same amount of metal in any other form. Men would then have known exactly how much of certain metals they were buying, selling, and promising to pay. And all the jugglery, cheating, and robbery that governments have practised, and licensed individuals to practise - by coining pieces bearing the same names, but having different amounts of metal - would have been avoided.
- Lysander Spooner, A LETTER TO GROVER CLEVLAND, Sec.XXII (1886).
“[N]o human is saintly enough to be entrusted with total power over another.”
- David Brion Davis, INHUMAN BONDAGE (2006), p. 198.
“There is nothing useful but what is just; there is no law of nature which makes one individual
dependent on another; and all those laws which reason disavows, have no force.
Every person brings with him into the world his [own] title to freedom.”
-LeGente (found in John Christice and Dwight Dumond, GEORGE BOURNE and
THE BOOK AND SLAVERY IRRECONCILABLE (1969), p. 148.
“Persons and groups reaching for illicit power customarily assume
attitudes of great moral rectitude to divert attention from the
abandonment of their own moral standards of behavior. Deception
of the multitude becomes necessary to sustain power, and deception
of others rapidly progresses to deception of self. All conquest
aristocracies have followed such paths. It would be incredible if
ours [in the United States] had not.”
- Francis Jennings, THE INVASION OF AMERICA (1976), p. vii.
Hard work drives away sad thoughts.
- paraphrased from Constance Savery, ENEMY BROTHERS (1943),
Chapter 18, “Ticket to London,” p. 240.
“But what reason have we more than past ages, to expect that we
will be blessed with impeccable rulers? We think not any. Although
it has been said that each generation grows wiser and wiser, yet
we have no reason to think that they grow better and better. And
therefore the probability lies upon the dark side. Does not the
experience of ages teach, that men have generally exercised all
the power they had given them, and even have usurped upon them,
in order to accomplish their own sinister and avaricious designs,
whenever they thought they could do so with impunity?”
- Consider Arms, Malichi Maynard, and Samuel Field, April 9, 1788 in
Herbert J. Storing, ed., THE COMPLETE ANTI-FEDERALIST (1981), Vol. 4,
Essay 26, p. 257.
"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt."
-Herbert Hoover
"The true gentleman does not preach what he practices till he has practiced what he preaches."
I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man that had no feet.
"It is better to suffer wrong than do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust… ."
-Samuel Johnson
"The end of one thing is only the beginning of another."
-Laura Ingalls Wilder, Chap. 27, THESE HAPPY GOLDEN YEARS.
"The Law of Two Feet":
If a person is in a place where he or she doesn't want to be, and is not
learning or contributing, the individual should use his or her own two feet and leave."
"If one can protest and prevent the commission of a sin by one's household,
one's fellow citizens, or the whole world and does not, one is accountable for those sins."
- (Shabbat 54b)
"When I first came here [Congress] twenty years ago, I was a libertarian …
a follower of Goldwater. After being here twenty years , its enough to make
anyone an anarcho-libertarian."
- Congressman Phi Crane (R-IL), C-SPAN, October 3, 1990.
"Governments are not the cause of a lack of freedom -- they are the result of it."
- Riqui Leon
"You can't break a man that don't borrow."
- Will Rogers
"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose."
- Kris Kristofferson, "Me and Bobby McGee"
"To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's famous statement about the press:
'If I had to choose between a government without a free market and a free market
without a government, I would far prefer the latter'."
- George Koether
"[N]ever before have so many Americans in all classes of society depended so
heavily on government. (Taxes to support government spending now consume 40 percent
of a typical American family's earnings. Put another way, the average American
family works about three hours a day for tax collectors.)"
- John Harmon McElroy, AMERICAN BELIEFS (1999), pp. 223-224.
"He has an anti-business mentality. He loves the poor so much, he advocates
policies that ensure there will be a lot more of them."
- The Rev. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute, speaking of one of his critics
in The Grand Rapids Press, November 11, 2000.
"Amateurs built the Ark; professionals built the Titanic!"
-Owen Newman
"The justice of using force against such a person [a right's violator] is
based on the fact that he or she violated the rights of the victim, not that he
or she consented to the jurisdiction of a court."
- Randy Barnett, THE STRUCTURE OF LIBERTY (1998), p. 278.
"[I]t is better not to live at all than to live without honor. ... [This is]
a conclusion which I have drawn from my own practical experience, and which has
proved practical for me in the sense that in extreme situations it simplifies
decisions that I have to make about myself."
- Vaclav Havel, DISTURBING THE PEACE (1990), p. 144.
"The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role that he has
invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him."
- Jan Patocka quoted in Vaclav Havel, DISTURBING THE PEACE (1993), pp. xv and 72.
"Paper 'Money"'
The Chinese invented paper "money" at the end of the eighth or beginning
of the ninth century AD. Its original name was 'flying money' because it was so
light and could blow out of one's hand.
- Robert Temple, THE GENIUS OF CHINA (1986), p. 117.
If precious metal coins are in circulation which are intrinsically
worth their true value, the only kind of counterfeiting possible is with false,
disguised metals. This has often been done, and was a major impetus to alchemy,
and the manufacture of spurious gold and silver. But paper money invited counterfeiting
by its very nature, since the essence of it is not its inherent substance but the
authority on which it was issued. Paper money is a symbol. To counterfeit is
therefore not to fabricate a substance but to impersonate the authority issuing it.
Since anyone can print on pieces of paper, the authority must make the processes of
manufacture of its paper money so intricate that they cannot be exactly reproduced.
- Robert Temple, THE GENIUS OF CHINA (1986), p. 118.
"Corn and wheat may grow. Cows come and go. But the bull of politicians goes on and on."
-Jacob Lapp
Nothing is more silly to say that the law made private property. The fact is the
exact opposite. Private property came to exist and it made the law.
-John Maxcy Zane, THE STORY OF LAW (2nd ed., reprinted 1998), p. 147.
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."
-attributed to Thomas Pinchent by Butler Shaffer in his talk, "To Vote or Not to Vote,"
Eris 2001 Conference, Aspen, CO.
"Indeed, 'the most distinctive contribution of Africa to human history has been precisely
in the civilized art of living reasonably peacefully without a state'."
- Migdal, Kohli, and Shue (eds), STATE POWER AND SOCIAL FORCES, (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 258 citing Jean-Francois Bayart,
L'ETAT EN AFRIQUE (Paris: Fayard, 1989), p. 58.
"That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind."
-- Said by Gandalf of Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Part Two,
"The Two Towers," Book Three, Chapter 5, (New York: Ballantine Books, 52nd Printing, p. 127).
If you hate, you'll become like those you hate, and maybe even worse than them. ...
"If the evil infects you with evil, then it has won a hundredfold."
-paraphrased from Michael D. O'Brien, PLAUGE JOURNAL (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999, p. 100, 238).
"By today's governmentally proscribed notions and definitions, the American revolutionaries were violent terrorists, common criminals, and treasonous political deviants who deserved nothing less than to hang at the end of a rope."
-Hans Sherrer, GULAG AMERICANA, Chapter 32.
"Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery they may indeed wait for ever."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) quoted in "England's Great Philistine, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL,
July 22, 1973, p. 26.
"The man who owns a slave, or lives by exploiting others, whether slave or not, is not himself a free man. He is a man who must look over his shoulder all the time, in fear. True freedom lies in a deep concern for the freedom of others, and if this is accepted it should make every man, out of pure selfishness, the ardent devotee of the freedom of his neighbor."
-Leonard Wibberly, 1776 - And All That (1975), p. 72.
"You only live once - but if you work it right, once is enough."
-Joe E. Lewis
[E]very policeman know that though governments may change, the police remains.
--Leon Trotsky, WHAT NEXT? (NY: Pioneer Publ., 1932), p. 18.
"When one is on the right road, one is bound to meet other travelers."
-old Jewish proverb
"It is morally wrong for the Government to swindle people out of their property by making false money."
-Hilaire Belloc, ECONOMICS FOR HELEN (1924), p. 72.
Be careful what you promise and to whom you make promises. "One is as bound to keep a sworn promise to a wicked man as to a good one."
-Cary Nederman
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Your best friends are those who bring out the best in you. ... I have found it is better to be alone than in the wrong company."
-John Mason
Power can rarely be wielded effectively over long periods of time unless it is perceived by the community in which it is exercised as a form of legitimate authority, not as mere coercive force.
-Brian Tierney, RELIGION, LAW, AND THE GROWTH OF CONSTITUTIONAL THOUGHT 1150-1650 (1982), p. x.
[T]o proclaim a people free to choose their own government but then to insist that the government
determine, through a government-controlled compulsory educational system, the very attitudes and values
by which the people will choose becomes the most insidious and pernicious form of tyranny: it gives the
people the illusion of freedom while all along controlling them through a form of governmental programming.
-Blair Adams, WHO OWNS THE CHILDREN? (1991), p. 46.
The fact that wholesale prices remain about the same over a given time period is no indication that monetary inflation is not occurring. As "Austrian" business cycle theory has pointed out, any bank credit inflation sets up conditions for boom-and-bust; there is no need for prices to actually rise. The reason that this is possible is that increased production of goods and services suffices to offset the effects of monetary expansion. In the events leading up to the great crash of 1929, most economists of the day held that a stable wholesale price level cannot, by definition, be inflationary. In reality, the unhampered free-market economy will usually increase the supply of goods and services and thereby bring about a gently falling price level, as happened in most of the nineteenth century except during wartime.
-Murray Rothbard, A HISTORY OF MONEY AND BANKING IN THE
UNITED STATES (2002), paraphrased from pp. 94-95.
"There is no law that can prevent men from using their freedom in disorderly fashion." Although the institution of private property promotes peace and equality, it cannot guarantee the abolition of evil.
-Alejandro Chafuen (quoting Domingto de Soto), FAITH AND LIBERTY (2003), p. 34.
"The only agreeable country is the one where no one is afraid of tax collectors."
-Alejandro Chafuen (quoting Pedro Fernandez Navarrete), FAITH AND LIBERTY (2003), p. 58.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
-Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi
No external force will ever succeed in making you 'want what you do not want and believe what you do not believe'. A man may take my life, but not my faith.
-Gerhard Oestreich, NEOSTOICISM AND THE EARLY MODERN STATE (1982), p. 27.
The evil of church-and state-coerced speech, whether in the form of forced recanting, repentance, naming names, flag statutes, or loyalty oaths, lies in the coercion itself ... .
-Haig Bosmajian, THE FREEDOM NOT TO SPEAK (1999), p. 198.
... [I]t is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than right in chains; ... .
-Thomas H. Huxley, LETTERS AND DIARIES: 1866 (November 8).
Whether or not you carry on in the face of adversity is determined not by your body but your mind.
-Robert Ringer, GETTING WHAT YOU WANT (2000), p. 243.
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we [stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people]."
-Remarks by President George W. Bush at the Signing of H.R. 4613.
the Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005, August 5, 2004.
I ... describe[d] the fierce pride of the [mountain] people;
their self-reliance and love of liberty; the rebellion against
taxation and all government restrictions or even "benefits"; how
out of centuries of tyranny they had learned the lesson well that
for every benefit, a freedom must always be surrendered.
-Catherine Marshall, CHRISTY (1967), Chapter Thirty-four.
To some people "freedom [is] a way of life. Not freedom for anything, just freedom from restrictions or irritations or responsibilities of any kind." Not me: I want freedom so I can be 100% responsible for myself and family.
-Catherine Marshall, CHRISTY (1967), Chapter Forty-two with additions by Carl Watner.
"Politics is the seedbed of social enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, morbid ambitions, and disrespect for the individual."
-Maxim Gorky, April 20, 1917, Novaia zhizn', cited in Orlando Figes, A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY (1986), p. 405.
"The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. ... Freedom and slavery are mental states. Therefore, the first thing to say to yourself: 'I shall no longer accept the role of a slave. I shall not obey orders as such but shall disobey them when they are in conflict with my conscience'."
-M. K. Gandhi quoted in Gene Sharp, THE POLITICS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION (1973), p. 59.
Government "education has torn us from our moorings, our training has made us hug the very chains that bind us."
-M. K. Gandhi quoted in Gene Sharp, THE POLITICS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION (1973), p. 57.
"These men - ..., the politicians, ... - use their position, their knowledge, and their power of disseminating misinformation to arouse and stimulate the latent instinct for bloodshed. When they have succeeded, they say they are reluctantly forced to war by the pressure of public opinion."
-Bertrand Russell, "War and Non-Resistance," ATLANTIC MONTHLY, August 1915, p. 274.
"If I learned anything from my unfortunate childhood it is that there is nothing that can dominate or conquer the human spirit."
-Dave Pelzer, HELP YOURSELF (New York: Dutton, 2000), p. xii.
"There is more power in socially organized masses on the march than there is in guns in the hands of a few desperate men. Our enemies would prefer to deal with a small armed group than with a huge, unarmed but resolute mass of people."
-Martin Luther King
"Power may come out of the barrel of a gun, but it requires people willing to hold and aim guns to exercise power."
"Look at something and see what is really there, not what you think it there."
"The existence of evil can never justify the existence of the State. If there is no evil, the State is unnecessary. If evil exists, the State is far too dangerous to be allowed to exist."
-Stefan Molyneux
"You never have an accident without being warned at least three times in advance."
-Peter Ragnar
"Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice."
-Attributed to H. L. Mencken
"I have a whole lot of conscience when it comes to dealing with people; but I sure don't have much conscience when it comes to dealing with the government."
-Rob Metcalf (feed mill customer)
"In the name of all that is reasonable and just, I ask, if our fathers had the right to make a Constitution, have we not the right to unmake it? And is it not our duty to unmake it, when it proves a failure and a curse?"
-Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr. in PROCEEDINGS OF THE STATE DISUNION CONVENTION HELD AT
WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS, January 15, 1857 (Boston: Printed for the Committee, 1857), p. 14.
"The thought of how far the human race [might] have advanced without government simply staggers the imagination."
-Attributed to Doug Casey, 1979
"If you ever wonder if a bureaucrat has the 'right' to do something, then just ask yourself this question: Does my neighbor have a right to do this to me?"
-Marc Stevens, ADVENTURES IN LEGAL LAND (2005), p. 159.
I was once asked if I thought the 'Founding Fathers' had good intentions. I replied that this was subjective and irrelevant. The only pertinent issue is whether they or any present day advocates of constitutional government believe[d] that protection and the other services governments provide should be provided on a voluntary basis. Would they arrest and place in jail a person who refused to contribute to the government?
-paraphrased from Marc Stevens, ADVENTURES IN LEGAL LAND (2005), p. 224.
