The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will.
There is no limit to the ingenuity of man if it is properly and vigorously applied under conditions of peace and justice.
The interventionists do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are. For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people.
When was public virtue to be found when private was not?
There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.
The true liberty of the press is amply secured by permitting every man to publish his opinion; but it is due to the peace and dignity of society, to inquire into the motives of such publications, and to distinguish between those which are meant for use and reformation, and with an eye solely to the public good, and those which are intended merely to delude and defame. To the latter description, it is impossible that any good government should afford protection and impunity.
All nonstate threats to life, liberty, and property appear to be relatively petty and therefore can be dealt with. Only states can pose truly massive threats, and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind invariably come to pass.
Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.
I feel constricted if I become too much aware of the act of making. Liberty is lost and instead of an instinctual lyrical expression the whole thing becomes arid.
Political liberty is nothing else but the diffusion of power.
If we can return to a government that the Founders, in their wisdom, envisioned for us, we can return to a government that will allow our economy to thrive again, and our people to live in liberty.
Taxation is not a method by which the community corporately provides itself with essential services, but a fund to be divided between different interests with political claims upon the state.
If humans were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it.
It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source. Thus it is that we are often not at liberty to do violence to error, because at the same time we do violence to truth.
The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.
'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.
Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.
The one condition for fighting for peace and liberty is to acquire self-restraint.
The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.