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Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -and both commonly succeed, and are right.

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.

It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority.

Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.

They who have reasoned ignorantly, or who have aimed at effecting their personal ends by flattering the popular feeling, have boldly affirmed that "one man is as good as another;" a maxim that is true in neither nature, revealed morals, nor political theory.

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

The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.

There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

...it may fairly be doubted if any political tyranny ever imposed on its people such a fear, such a longing for freedom, such a paralysis of the spirit, as disease. I doubt if the average Englishman felt himself as much oppressed by Charles I as by the plague; or if any colonial American was as much in dread of taxation without representation as of smallpox. And it may reasonably be contended that Walter Reed and William Crawford Gorgas brought to man freedom in a more happy sense and in a larger measure than any military or political leader.

All that a good government aims at...is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities.

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

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life; but only a fool trusts either of them.

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.

...no civilized society can long exist, with an active power in its bosom that is stronger than the law.