Trego's Mountain Ear

The essential notion of a capitalist society … is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
-Milton Friedman

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens.
-Adam Smith

There is no moral distinction between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax.
-Leonard Read

I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.
-Clarence Thomas

All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
-I. F. Stone

The true remedy for most evils is none other than liberty, unlimited and complete liberty, liberty in every field of human endeavor.
-Gustave de Molinari

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this.
-Ron Paul

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
-Charles Evans Hughes

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
-Henry David Thoreau

What we should have fought for was representation without taxation.
-Sam Levenson

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

Liberals want the government to be your Mommy. Conservatives want government to be your Daddy. Libertarians want it to treat you like an adult.
-Andre Marrou

Government is best which governs least
-Thomas Paine

The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
-Ludwig von Mises

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
-H. L. Mencken

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.
-Mortimer Adler

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

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
-Robert A. Heinlein

There comes a time when a moral man can’t obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise 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, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
-Thomas Jefferson

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-P. J. O’Rourke

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
-Plato

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.
-John Locke

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
-John Stuart Mill