Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.

A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it -- it keeps him upright.

The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

...economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.

Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'etre to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man's innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.

Government is beating into submission, imprisoning, and killing...The authority of man-made law is entirely due to weapons of the constables who enforce obedience to its provisions.

The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous.

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.

The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.

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.

No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law.

It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.

We vote too much. We deliberate too little. We have brought within the scope of the federal jurisdiction a vast number of subjects that do not belong here, but are nevertheless here. What we need to do is to stop passing laws. We have enough laws now to govern the world for the next ten thousand years.

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.

To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.

Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.

One can become a leader only if one is supported by an ideology which makes other people tractable and accommodating.

The modern definition of 'racist' is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal.

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.