by Curt Kovener
On Sunday, we celebrate the 245th birthday of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence. Contemplate on these famous quotes about liberty, both political and economic as I am convinced much can be learned from remembering past lessons on these subjects.
“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.” —Abraham Lincoln.
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” —Søren Kierkegaard
“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.”—John Basil Barnhill.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” —George Orwell.
“My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” —Adlai Stevenson
“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” —Nelson Mandela.
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” Benjamin Franklin writing as Silence Dogood
“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.” —Leon Trotsky
“I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.” —Theodore Roosevelt
“This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.” —Robert G. Ingersoll,
“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.” —Napoleon Bonaparte
“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. —John F. Kennedy
“Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.” —Woodrow Wilson.
“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.” —Justice Louis Brandeis.
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.” —H.L. Mencken.
“Those who nourish the hope that it will be possible to keep central government free of the corrupting tendencies of power and to staff it with a freedom-loving elite, overestimate the virtues of both the electorate and the elected, and underestimate the normative power of structural processes even over well-intended functionaries.”—Robert Nef.
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” —George Bernard Shaw
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings.” —Winston Churchill.
“Economic freedom is… an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.” —Milton Friedman.
“When plunder has become a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.” —Frédéric Bastiat.
“The truth unquestionably is, that the only subversion of the republican system of the country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion and bring on civil commotion. When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents…despotic in his ordinary demeanor—known to have scoffed in private life the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount his hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with the nonsense of the zealots of the day—it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind’.”
—Alexander Hamilton