Winston Churchill Quotes

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

“I like a man who grins when he fights.”

“There is no such thing as a good tax.”

“Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.”

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

“We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

“If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.”

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

“There is no greater mistake than to suppose that platitudes, smooth words, and timid policies offer a path to safety.”

“How many wars have been averted by patience and good will?”

“An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”

“If I were asked the difference between Socialism and Communism, I could only reply that the Socialist tries to lead us to disaster by foolish words and the Communist could try to drive us there by violent deeds.”

“Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State.”

“No socialist system can be established without a political police.”

“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”

“It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of socialism.”

“‘All men are created equal’ says the American Declaration of Independence. ‘All men shall be kept equal’ say the Socialists.”

“If you destroy a free market, you create a black market.”

“Socialism assails the pre-eminence of the individual.”

“Is it better to have equality at the price of poverty or well-being at the price of inequality?”

“Let them quit these gospels of envy, hate, and malice. Let them abandon the utter fallacy, the grotesque, erroneous, fatal blunder of believing that by limiting the enterprise of man, by riveting the shackles of a false equality…they will increase the well-being of the world.”

Great motivational quotes

Lots of great motivational quotes are found at the website The Art of Manliness:

Theodore Roosevelt “The worst lesson that can be taught to a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings.”

Founding Fathers “One man with courage is a majority.” -Thomas Jefferson

Winston Churchill Part I Part II “I like a man who grins when he fights.”

George S. Patton “All glory is fleeting.”

For my list of some of the best conservative quotes, click here.

“Freedom is a rare and delicate flower.”

A classic discussion with economist Milton Friedman, just as relevant and powerful today as in 1975 (transcript here). You’ll find some of the best Milton Friedman quotes on government, capitalism and freedom here.

John Adams Quotes on Government and Liberty

We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.

Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.

Let us disappoint the Men who are raising themselves upon the ruin of this Country.

I answered that the die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon. Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations … This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.

Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.

Be not intimidated… nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have… a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.

No good government but what is republican… the very definition of a republic is ‘an empire of laws, and not of men.’

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the universe.

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!” But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell.

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

The way to secure liberty is to place it in the people’s hands, that is, to give them the power at all times to defend it in the legislature and in the courts of justice.

Because power corrupts, society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.

When I went home to my family in May, 1770, from the town meeting in Boston, which was the first I had ever attended, and where I had been chosen in my absence, without any solicitation, one of their representatives, I said to my wife, “I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning, that you may prepare your mind for your fate.” She burst into tears, but instantly cried out in a transport of magnanimity, “Well, I am willing in this cause to run all risks with you, and be ruined with you, if you are ruined.” These were times, my friend, in Boston, which tried women’s souls as well as men’s.

Be not intimidated…nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.

Milton Friedman on Poverty and the Poor

Walter Williams Quotes on Government, Capitalism and Liberty

A right, such as a right to free speech, imposes no obligation on another, except that of non-interference. The so-called right to health care, food or housing, whether a person can afford it or not, is something entirely different; it does impose an obligation on another. If one person has a right to something he didn’t produce, simultaneously and of necessity it means that some other person does not have right to something he did produce. That’s because, since there’s no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy, in order for government to give one American a dollar, it must, through intimidation, threats and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American.

Government is necessary, but the only rights we can delegate to government are the ones we possess. For example, we all have a natural right to defend ourselves against predators. Since we possess that right, we can delegate authority to government to defend us. By contrast, we don’t have a natural right to take the property of one person to give to another; therefore, we cannot legitimately delegate such authority to government.

There are people in need of help. Charity is one of the nobler human motivations. The act of reaching into one’s own pockets to help a fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else’s pocket is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

If we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.

In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves.

Most of our country’s serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism.

Charity is reaching into one’s own pockets to assist his fellow man in need. Reaching into someone else’s pocket to assist one’s fellow man hardly qualifies as charity. When done privately, we deem it theft, and the individual risks jail time.

President Obama could rise several notches in my book if he refused the Nobel Peace Prize, with a nice letter to the Nobel Committee that might read: Since you did not see fit to award Ronald Reagan, the U.S. president who did the most for world peace in this century, by peaceably shutting down the Soviet Union, I respectfully decline your offer.

How you make it in this world, for the most part, depends more on what you do as opposed to whether people like or dislike you. In order to produce a successful life, one must find ways to please his fellow man. That is, find out what goods and services his fellow man values, and is willing to pay for, and then acquire the necessary skills and education to provide it.

One of the wonderful things about free markets is that the path to greater wealth comes not from looting, plundering and enslaving one’s fellow man, as it has throughout most of human history, but by serving and pleasing him.

People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What’s more, they believe they’ve been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others.

Equality before the general rules of law is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty that can be secured without destroying liberty. It is an equality that neither requires nor assumes people are in fact equal. Our attempt to make people equal in fact by rigging law to produce equal results destroys civility and generalized respect for the law. Government cannot create an advantage for one person without simultaneously creating a disadvantage for another.

Two vital marketplace signals are the profits that come with success and the losses that come with failure. When these two signals are not allowed to freely function, markets operate less efficiently.

In general, presidents and congressmen have very limited power to do good for the economy and awesome power to do bad. The best good thing that politicians can do for the economy is to stop doing bad. In part, this can be achieved through reducing taxes and economic regulation, and staying out of our lives.

Should the fact that if I become injured by not wearing a seatbelt or sick from eating and smoking too much, and become a burden on taxpayers, determine whether I’m free to not wear a seatbelt or puff cigarettes and gorge myself? Is there a problem with freedom? I say no, it’s a problem of socialism. There is absolutely no moral case for government’s taking another American’s earnings, through taxes, to care for me for any reason whatsoever. Doing so is simply a slightly less offensive form of slavery. Keep in mind that the essence of slavery is the forceful use of one person to serve the purposes or benefit of another.

What we call the market is really a democratic process involving millions, and in some markets billions, of people making personal decisions that express their preferences. When you hear someone say that he doesn’t trust the market, and wants to replace it with government edicts, he’s really calling for a switch from a democratic process to a totalitarian one.

Suppose I hire you to repair my computer. The job is worth $200 to me and doing the job is worth $200 to you. The transaction will occur because we have a meeting of the mind. Now suppose there’s the imposition of a 30 percent income tax on you. That means you won’t receive $200 but instead $140. You might say the heck with working for me — spending the day with your family is worth more than $140. You might then offer that you’ll do the job if I pay you $285. That way your after-tax earnings will be $200 — what the job was worth to you. There’s a problem. The repair job was worth $200 to me, not $285. So it’s my turn to say the heck with it. This simple example demonstrates that one effect of taxes is that of eliminating transactions, and hence jobs.

If I see a person in need of food, what if I walk up to another person and, through threats, intimidation and coercion, take his money and give it to the needy person? I believe and hope that most Americans would see such an act as theft. Would the conclusion differ if we collectively agreed to take one person’s money to feed the needy person? It’d still be theft. Immoral acts such as theft, rape and murder don’t become moral when done collectively through a majority decision.

We might think of dollars as being “certificates of performance.” The better I serve my fellow man, and the higher the value he places on that service, the more certificates of performance he gives me. The more certificates I earn, the greater my claim on the goods my fellow man produces. That’s the morality of the market. In order for one to have a claim on what his fellow man produces, he must first serve him. Contrast that moral standard to Congress’ standing offer, “Vote for me and I’ll take what your fellow man produces and give it to you.

The idea that minimum wage legislation is an anti-poverty tool is simply sheer nonsense. Were it an anti-poverty weapon, we might save loads of foreign aid expenditures simply by advising legislators in the world’s poorest countries, such as Haiti, Bangladesh and Ethiopia, to legislate higher minimum wages. Even applied to the United States, there’s little evidence suggesting that increases in the minimum wage help the poor. Plus, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 2.2 percent of working adults earn the minimum wage.

Many law professors, and others who hold contempt for our Constitution, preach that the Constitution is a living document. Saying that the Constitution is a living document is the same as saying we don’t have a Constitution. For rules to mean anything, they must be fixed. How many people would like to play me poker and have the rules be “living”? Depending on “evolving standards,” maybe my two pair could beat your flush.

Once one accepts the principle of self-ownership, what’s moral and immoral becomes self-evident. Murder is immoral because it violates private property. Rape and theft are also immoral — they also violate private property. Here’s an important question: Would rape become morally acceptable if Congress passed a law legalizing it? You say: “What’s wrong with you, Williams? Rape is immoral plain and simple, no matter what Congress says or does!” If you take that position, isn’t it just as immoral when Congress legalizes the taking of one person’s earnings to give to another? Surely if a private person took money from one person and gave it to another, we’d deem it theft and, as such, immoral. Does the same act become moral when Congress takes people’s money to give to farmers, airline companies or an impoverished family? No, it’s still theft, but with an important difference: It’s legal, and participants aren’t jailed.

The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.

Try this thought experiment. Pretend you’re a tyrant. Among your many liberty-destroying objectives are extermination of blacks, Jews and Catholics. Which would you prefer, a United States with political power centralized in Washington, powerful government agencies with detailed information on Americans and compliant states or power widely dispersed over 50 states, thousands of local jurisdictions and a limited federal government?

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It’s high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

The War between the States… produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today’s federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. … [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed’

Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.

No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.

History is not going to be kind to liberals. With their mindless programs, they’ve managed to do to Black Americans what slavery, Reconstruction, and rank racism found impossible: destroy their family and work ethic.

Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don’t know whom to blame for their calamity.

Why is it that Michael Jordan earns $33 million a year and I don’t even earn one-half of one percent of that? I can play basketball, but my problem is with my fellow man, who’d plunk down $200 to see Jordan play and wouldn’t pay a dollar to see me play. I’m also willing to sell my name as endorsements for sneakers and sport clothing, but no one has approached me. The bottom line explanation of Michael Jordan’s income relative to mine lies in his capacity to please his fellow man. The person who takes exception to Jordan’s salary or sees him, as my letter-writer does, as making “little contribution to society” is really disagreeing with decisions made by millions upon millions of independent decision-makers who decided to fork over their money to see Jordan play. The suggestion that Congress ought to take part of Jordan’s earnings and give it to someone else is the same as arrogantly saying, “I know better who ought to receive those dollars.

If we’re ignorant of the historical sacrifices that made our liberties possible, we will be less likely to make the sacrifices again so that those liberties are preserved for future generations. And, if we’re ignorant, we won’t even know when government infringes on our liberties. Moreover, we’ll happily cast our votes for those who’d destroy our liberties.

If we truly cared about our children and future generations, instead of demagoging about them, we’d worry more about saving liberty than saving Social Security.

Abraham Lincoln Quotes

Quotes on Liberty and Government from our 16th President:

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.

Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men.

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.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.

Property is the fruit of labor…property is desirable…is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name – liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.

Let us then turn this government back into the channel in which the framers of the Constitution originally placed it.

I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

Any nation that does not honor its heroes will not long endure.

Margaret Thatcher Quotes

Quotes from the ‘Iron Lady’ to inspire and embolden:

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.

No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.

Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning. [video]

What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state.

The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.

Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

Hope is no basis for a defense policy.

Well behaved women seldom make history.

We should back the workers, not the shirkers.

When you hold back the successful, you penalize those who need help.

Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.

There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

Many of our troubles are due to the fact that our people turn to politicians for everything.

The Labour Party believes in turning workers against owners; we believe in turning workers into owners.

Good Conservatives always pay their bills. And on time. Not like the Socialists who run up other people’s bills.

Socialists have always spent much of their time seeking new titles for their beliefs, because the old versions so quickly become outdated and discredited.

Let me give you my vision: A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free country, and on that freedom all of our other freedoms depend.

Communist regimes were not some unfortunate aberration, some historical deviation from a socialist ideal. They were the ultimate expression, unconstrained by democratic and electoral pressures, of what socialism is all about. … In short, the state [is] everything and the individual nothing.

Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life. … There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.

We who are living in the west today are fortunate. Freedom has been bequeathed to us. We have not had to carve it out of nothing; we have not had to pay for it with our lives. But it would be a grave mistake to think that freedom requires nothing of us. Each of us has to earn freedom anew in order to possess it. We do so not just for our own sake, but for the sake of our children, so that they may build a better future that will sustain over the world the responsibilities and blessings of freedom.

Socialism’s results have ranged between the merely shabby and the truly catastrophic – poverty, strife, oppression and, on the killing fields of communism, the deaths this century of perhaps 100 million people. Against that doctrine was set a contrary, conservative belief in a law-governed liberty. It was this view which triumphed with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Since then, the Left has sought rehabilitation by distancing itself from its past.

I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society — from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain

Socialists cry “Power to the people”, and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean—power over people, power to the State.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Remembering the Challenger 7

On this day in 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded soon after take-off, killing all seven astronauts on board.

Ronald Reagan’s First State of the Union Address, January 1982

As you watch, notice that for Reagan, everything is “we” “Americans” and “together”. For Obama, it’s all “me” and “I”. It’s very revealing of their attitude toward the office they hold and the nation they lead.

Tear down this wall!

Reagan’s magnificent speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, 1987.

Why won’t Obama go to Berlin to celebrate with other Western leaders the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Ed Morrissey suggests Obama won’t go because it’s not about him. “I think the answer is simpler: Berlin won’t be about Obama. It will honor previous generations of stalwarts against an evil empire that Academia defended for decades….. It’s not that Obama doesn’t think that the fall of the wall is a good thing, but that it has nothing to do with him, and is therefore irrelevant.”

Rich Lowry describes Obama’s failure to attend the ceremony as the most telling nonevent of his presidency.

Thomas Sowell Quotes

I recommend Thomas Sowell’s recent editorials: Dismantling America, Part I and Dismantling America, Part II. For a second series of essays under the same title, click here. In case you are not familiar with him, Dr. Sowell is an American economist, social commentator, and author of dozens of books. His views on race and economics, poverty and politics are often provocative (see Crippled by their Culture) and inspiring and always deeply rooted in his courageous and honest exploration of life in America. Below are inspired quotes on economics, freedom and government from the brilliant Dr. 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.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.

One of the consequences of such notions as “entitlements” is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.

Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.

The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer’s money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to “help.”

Most people who read “The Communist Manifesto” probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of “the workers”.

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

What “multiculturalism” boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have cost without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more to produce than if they were produced by enterprises operating without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits.

Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, “What about the other 90 percent of the people?”

The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about ‘social justice’ all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.

We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it.

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.

Those things that help human beings be independent and self-reliant—whether automobiles, guns, the free market, or vouchers—provoke instant hostility from the anointed.

This must be the golden age of presumptuous ignorance.

American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.

The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity.

The fraudulence of the left’s concern about poverty is exposed by their utter lack of interest in ways of increasing the nation’s wealth. Wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty. The reason there is less poverty today is not because the poor got a bigger slice of the pie but because the whole pie got a lot bigger—no thanks to the left.

Those who rail against profits and “greed” seldom stop to think through what they are saying, much less go check the facts. Most of the great American fortunes– Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, etc. — came from finding more efficient ways to produce a product or service at a lower cost, so that it could be sold at a lower price and attract more customers. If making a fortune represents greed, then greed is what drives prices down.

Those who are convinced that the government has to “do something” when the economy has a problem almost never bother to find out what actually happens when the government intervenes.

If there is ever a contest to pick which word has done the most damage to people’s thinking, and to actions to carry out that thinking, my nomination would be the word “fair.”

The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be “materialistic” and “greedy” to want to keep what you have earned. But it is “idealistic” to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit or to feel good about yourself.

Intolerance may not promote progress but it can promote survival. An intolerant Islamic world may outlast the Western world that seems ready to tolerate anything, including the undermining of its own fundamental values and threats to its continued existence.

Ayn Rand Videos

Mike Wallace interview, Part 2, Part 3

Phil Donahue interview, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Tom Snyder interview, Part 2, Part 3

Click here for my list of Ayn Rand quotes.

More on The Long Shelf Life of Ayn Rand’s Legacy.

We seem to have forgotten…

It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
–Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954)

Neither subject nor servant.

“The paternalistic ‘what your country can do for you’ implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, ‘what you can do for your country’ implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors, and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshiped and served.”
–Milton Friedman

Reagan’s First Inaugural Address

Video highlights of Reagan’s First Inaugural Address — an inspiring, eloquent and timeless statement of conservative principles…

Milton Friedman Quotes on Government, Capitalism and Freedom

Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was an American economist and recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for economics. Friedman advocated limited government, deregulation, privatization, free trade and individual freedom around the globe. His ideas helped lead to thirty years of economic expansion — a time when more people were lifted from poverty than ever before in world history. Below are some quotes to instruct and inspire…

Click here to watch his original 1980 classic “Free to Choose” (As well as the 1990 update). Click here for another’s list of Friedman favorites.

Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue Show discussing government, capitalism and freedom…

1979 Show… Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

1980 Show… Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Friedman on which cabinet departments should stay and which should go.

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.

Inflation is taxation without legislation.

Most economic fallacies derive – from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.

If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven’t cut taxes enough.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.

What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

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

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.

A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today’s less well off to become tomorrow’s rich, and in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a richer and fuller life.

If the government is to try and ban private consumption of alcohol and tobacco, it must surely ban such activities as hang-gliding, skiing, rock-climbing and so on. Where should it stop? Rugby? American Football? Ice Hockey? Insofar as the government has information not generally available about the merits or demerits of the items we ingest or the activities we engage in, let it give us the information. But let it leave us free to choose what chances we want to take with our own lives.

The long-range solution to high unemployment is to increase the incentive for ordinary people to save, invest, work, and employ others. We make it costly for employers to employ people; we subsidize people not to go to work We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.

Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.

The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn’t do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn’t do a thing for them.

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.

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.

Keynesian economics doesn’t work, but nothing is harder for men than to face facts that threaten to undermine strongly held beliefs.

Keynes was wrong on just about everything, and his followers are wrong on absolutely everything.

Freedom is a rare and delicate flower.

[T]here is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engage in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. We all know a famous road that is paved with good intentions. The people who go around talking about their soft heart …, but unfortunately, it very often extends to their head as well, because the fact is that the programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have.

I challenge you to name a single social measure which has accomplished its intended objectives rather than the opposite, which has not done more harm than good[.]

If I want to do good with other people’s money I’d first have to take it away from them. That means that the welfare state philosophy of doing good with other people’s money, at its very bottom, is a philosophy of violence and coercion. It’s against freedom, because I have to use force to get the money.

I think it’s Big Brother who has to be looked after, and not the people.

[I]t is a natural human tendency to take for granted the good things that happen and to regard as the workings of the devil the bad things. And that if a bad thing comes along, you say, my God, we ought to pass a law and do something. That’s a very natural human tendency. I think the remarkable thing, the thing that needs to be explained, is not why we’ve had a movement towards collectivism and towards more government control, because that’s been the natural state of mankind for thousands of years. The remarkable thing in my opinion, from an intellectual point of view, is how you ever managed to get a century or a century and a half in which the dominant philosophy was the opposite. That’s the exception.

I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing. And it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to try to do … something about them you not only may make them worse, but you will spread your tentacles and get bad results elsewhere.

[G]overnment is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men, get in a position of controlling them.

[P]edagogical ability is a vice rather than a virtue if it is devoted to teaching error.” (quoting one of his professors)

I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it’s only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.

Walter Williams and the Danger of Good Intentions

Click here to watch a brilliant series of classic videos by economist Walter Williams as he discusses the devastating impact of well-intentioned government policies.

The Primacy of Property Rights

When most Americans speak of personal liberties, they tend to think only in terms of First Amendment rights.  However, it is important that Americans recognize that property rights are just as essential and, in many ways, foundational to all other rights.  The right to earn and buy and own and use and dispose of private property as one sees fit is presently being gutted by this regime.  We see government telling companies what they can and cannot do, what they can and cannot pay, and what products they may and may not produce.  Hard working citizens are seeing more of their wealth being confiscated by a repressive and irresponsible government to benefit wasteful pet causes or redistributed to increasingly dependent citizens.  Dear Leader believes he, and only he, knows best — that as a supremely enlightened being, he and his cronies can best pick the winners and losers in society and can best allocate its limited resources.  The market and individual investors and consumers cannot be trusted they say – only elite government bureaucrats know best. History is not on their side.  Here are some quotes to help remind us of the importance of our right to private property.  As the 5th Amendment of the Constitution says,  “No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Government has no other end than the preservation of property. –John Locke

The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property. –John Locke

Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing. –Calvin Coolidge

If government have a right of demanding ad libitum and of taxing us themselves to the full amount of their demand if we do not comply with it, this would leave us without anything we can call property. –Thomas Jefferson

The Right of property is the guardian of every other Right, and to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their Liberty. –Arthur Lee

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can. –Samuel Adams

Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty. –John Adams

Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property. –Ayn Rand

Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race. –William Howard Taft

No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent. –John Jay

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. –John Adams.

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. –Samuel Adams

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. –James Madison

… whenever the Legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience … [Power then] devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty, and, by the Establishment of a new Legislative (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own Safety and Security, which is the end for which they are in Society. –John Locke

All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety. –George Mason

As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending. –Andrew Jackson

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. —Fredrich Hayek

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark. –Lippmann Walter

A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first elements of freedom. –Lord Acton

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. — Frederic Bastiat

[A] private property regime makes people responsible for their own actions in the realm of material goods. Such a system therefore ensures that people experience the consequences of their own acts. Property sets up fences, but it also surrounds us with mirrors, reflecting back upon us the consequences of our own behavior. –Tom Bethell

That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression. –Alabama, Declaration of Rights Article I Section 35

No man’s life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session. –Author Unknown

Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society. –David Friedman

Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he is free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family. –Herbert Hoover

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights… –Ayn Rand

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization. –Ludwig von Mises

The best way to put more money in people’s wallets is to leave it there in the first place. –Edwin Feulner

Ronald Reagan Quotes on Government and Liberty

Inspirational words from the greatest President of the 20^th Century:

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.

The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.

The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last – but eat you he will.

We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

Welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.

All of us should remember that the Federal Government is not some mysterious institution comprised of buildings, files, and paper. The people are the government. What we create we ought to be able to control.

Because we’re a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours.

Common sense told us that when you put a big tax on something, the people will produce less of it. So, we cut the people’s tax rates, and the people produced more than ever before.

We are learning that the way to prosperity is not more bureaucracy and redistribution of wealth but less government and more freedom for the entrepreneur and for the creativity of the individual.

The historian Edward Gibbon wrote about ancient Athens, the first democracy and the fountainhead of Western culture. He wrote that when the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.

Unless bureaucracy is constantly resisted, it breaks down representative government and overwhelms democracy.

The federal government has taken on functions it was never intended to perform and which it does not perform well. There should be a planned, orderly transfer of such functions to states and communities and a transfer with them of the sources of taxation to pay for them.

Government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us.

We are going to put an end to the notion that the American taxpayer exists to fund the federal government. The federal government exists to serve the American people.

The other party exploits the natural division between business and labor. Republicans are trying to bring all our citizens together in a campaign for economic progress.

Here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights. We the people declared that government is created by the people for their own convenience. Government has no power except those voluntarily granted to it by we the people.

I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself under mediocre leadership that drifts from one crisis to the next, eroding our national will and purpose.

America must remain freedom’s staunchest friend, for freedom is our best ally and it is the world’s only hope to conquer poverty and preserve peace.

The Founding Fathers established a nation under God, ruled not by arbitrary decrees of kings or the whims of entrenched elites but by the consent of the governed. Theirs was the vision of a striving, God-fearing, self-reliant people living in the sunlight of justice and breathing the bracing air of liberty.

We are taxing ourselves into economic exhaustion and stagnation, crushing our ability and incentive to save, invest and produce. This must stop.

There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

Our Founding Fathers devised a system of government unique in all the world – a federation of sovereign States, with as much law and decision-making authority as possible kept at the local level.

When we deprive people of what they have earned, or take away their jobs, we destroy their dignity and undermine their families.

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. It´s so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world.

I think the best possible social program is a job.

The size of the Federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.

Our federal tax system is, in short, utterly impossible, utterly unjust and completely counterproductive, [it] reeks with injustice and is fundamentally un-American… it has earned a rebellion and it’s time we rebelled.

The federal government has taken too much tax money from the people, too much authority from the states, and too much liberty with the Constitution.

Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.

Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite.

Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself. … [I] hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited.

There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

Republicans believe the best way to assure prosperity is to generate more jobs. The Democrats believe in more welfare.

Never forget that this is America, the land where dreams come true.

I’ve noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.

I’m convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority. Very simply, they want to be left alone in peace and safety to take care of the family by earning an honest dollar and putting away some savings. This may not sound too exciting, but there is something magnificent about it. On the farm, on the street corner, in the factory and in the kitchen, millions of us ask nothing more, but certainly nothing less than to live our own lives according to our values — at peace with ourselves, our neighbors and the world.

Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.

[click here to read **and watch videos of** more great quotes from the Reagan Library]

Ayn Rand Quotes on Capitalism, Government and Liberty

Quotes from conservative philosopher Ayn Rand to inspire and embolden…

It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Government “help” to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Capitalism demands the best of every man – his rationality – and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

Capitalism is the only system that can make freedom, individuality, and the pursuit of values possible in practice. When I say ‘capitalism,’ I mean a pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism – with a separation of economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as a separation of state and church.

The [U.S.] Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals … it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government … it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen’s protection against the government.

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers.

The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time. The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights…

Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

I say that man is entitled to his own happiness and that he must achieve it himself. But that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.

We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody.

I am opposed to all forms of control; I am for an absolute laissez faire, free, unregulated economy. I am for the separation of the state and economics, just as we had separation of state and church, which led to peaceful coexistence among different religions…so the same applies to economics. If you separate the government from economics, if you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation, and harmony and justice among men.

All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure is always offered to take more of the poison that caused the disaster. Depressions are not the result of a free economy.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.

Thomas Jefferson Quotes on Government and Liberty

Quotes to enlighten and inspire from our third president, Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826):

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.

The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.

I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government…

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.

We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves.

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.