liberty

How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.

Some that read this book will find its Libertarian and Constitutionalist slant a bit obtuse and maybe even off-putting. This author makes no apologies for viewing the history of the eugenics movement from this political perspective. It is the ethical and legal underpinnings of the American Revolution that remain as a guiding light while the eugenics movement continues to reemerge long after its alleged demise. Limited, or rather minimal government, goes a long way to curtail the disconnect that emerges when government grows so large that it no longer feels compelled to heed to the dictates of the governed.

Benefit is the only blindfold required to convince ourselves that poison is wine. Liberty's comfort level rises and falls with the sympathies of its children. Well, I for one will not collaborate.

I would entertain the apparently fading idea that patriotism that serves the self is greed dressed in the garments of liberty and adorned with the fashion accessories of other associated patriotic notions.

Whoever fails in the consideration generally due to the interests and feelings of others, not being compelled by some more imperative duty, or justified by allowable self-preference, is a subject of moral disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it, nor for the errors, merely personal to himself, which may have remotely led to it. In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty.

When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.

The phenomenon of economic ignorance is so widespread, and its consequences so frightening, that the objective of reducing that ignorance becomes a goal invested with independent moral worth.

Don't let people supervise your life, If you know who you are, you shouldn't be living in that prison of dominance, live by your orders, you are your own soldier.

Freedom is the foundation for all wonderful things in life.

If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.

My evanescent anarchistic tendencies are purely classical. I use the word anarchist in the sense in which it was understood by the ancient Greeks. They, of course, accepted the anarchist as a fairly respectable--if somewhat vehement--opponent of government encroachment on the individual's rights to think and act freely. It is in this sense that I glimpse myself as an anarchist--regretting the growth of government and the ever-increasing trend toward regulation and, worst of all, standardization of human activity.

Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!

Very few tyrants argued for the slavery of the masses. Instead, they argued for their right to protect the people from themselves.

Our Supreme Court is not a court of law. It is a court of conjecture and political fad.

Government programs didn__ arise because the people demanded them or because the free market was unable to provide needed services. They arose because the politicians found them to be a convenient way to buy votes with other people__ money, a convenient way to enlarge their own power, a convenient way to reward their political cronies, and a convenient way to keep people dependent on government.

If I am asked, What do you propose to substitute for universal suffrage? Practically, What have you to recommend? I answer at once, Nothing. The whole current of thought and feeling, the whole stream of human affairs, is setting with irresistible force in that direction. The old ways of living, many of which were just as bad in their time as any of our devices can be in ours, are breaking down all over Europe, and are floating this way and that like haycocks in a flood. Nor do I see why any wise man should expend much thought or trouble on trying to save their wrecks. The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

Some capitalism suffers from cronyism. All of socialism is perverted by the crony statism of the powerful few.