“The true meaning of America, you ask? It’s in a Texas rodeo, in a policeman’s badge, in the sound of laughing children, in a political rally, in a newspaper. ... In all these things, and many more, you’ll find America. In all these things, you’ll find freedom. And freedom is what America means to the world. And to me” — Actor, poet, and the most decorated American of World War II, Audie Murphy.
Mill on Freedom
“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. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”
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Best-Selling Japanese Novelist Eiji Yoshikawa on Do-Gooders
“There’s nothing more frightening than a half-baked do-gooder who knows nothing of the world but takes it upon himself to tell the world what’s good for it — from his book, Musashi.
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Sowell on Solutions
"Many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions."
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Reed on Capitalism vs Socialism
“Capitalism is what happens when you leave peaceful people alone. Socialism is what happens when you don’t. Capitalism is spontaneous, natural order. Socialism is just some bully’s orders.”
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Reed on Progressivism
"Progressivism" means never understanding economics, never taking responsibility for the disasters you create, never shedding the hate and envy you feel for those who create wealth, and never having to say you're sorry for ruining the lives of others, many of whom never asked for your "help" in the first place.
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Voltaire on Tyranny
“So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men” — French philosopher, historian and Enlightenment activist, François-Marie Arouet, whose nom de plume was Voltaire.
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Snow on Resistance
“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.” — English chemist and novelist C. P. Snow.
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Reed on Goodreads →
Thanks to whoever at Goodreads compiled and posted these.
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George on Truth
“[T]ruth is the ground and condition of freedom. Unless it is true that human beings deserve to have fundamental liberties respected and protected, the tyrant does no wrong in violating them. Relativism, skepticism, and subjectivism about truth provide no secure basis for freedom. We should honor civil liberties because the norms enjoining us to respect and protect them are valid, sound, in a word, true” — Princeton professor Robert P. George, Twitter post, 1 January 2018.
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Paterson on Government Schools
“There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure…. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state” — Isabel Paterson in The God of the Machine (1943).
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Milton on Liberty
“For stories teach us that liberty sought out of season, in a corrupt and degenerate age, brought Rome itself to a farther slavery: for liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands: neither is it completely given, but by them who have the happy skill to know what is grievance and unjust to a people, and how to remove it wisely; what good laws are wanting, and how to frame them substantially, that good men may enjoy the freedom which they merit, and the bad the curb which they need” — 17th Century English poet and man of letters John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, as cited in The Prose Works of John Milton, Volume II, Book III.
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Spinoza on Government
“The ultimate aim of government is not to rule or restrain by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others. No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty…The real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over” — 17th Century Jewish-Dutch political philosopher Baruch Spinoza in Theological-Political Treatise (1670).
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Sowell on Foreign Aid
“One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it” — economist Thomas Sowell.
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Scruton on Marxism
“It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought” — British author and intellectual Roger Scruton in Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006).
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Kisielewski on Socialism
Hilarious, brilliant, incisive. That describes the late Stefan Kisielewski (1911-1991), the prominent Polish intellectual. He was a constant thorn in the side of the communists and socialists because he had the courage to speak truth to power. I interviewed him in 1986 in Warsaw, when he told me that he had once been arrested and jailed for simply declaring that "Socialism is stupidism," which only proved his point. On another occasion, he famously said, tongue-in-cheek, "Socialism heroically overcomes difficulties unknown in any other system." In 1981, to make the point that the bad economic times in socialist Poland were the product of the system itself, he said, "It's not a crisis, it's a result."
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Koestler on Communism
“In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubyanka” — British-Hungarian philosopher and ex-communist Arthur Koestler, author of the anti-totalitarian novel, Darkness at Noon. This quote is from his 1954 autobiography, The Invisible Writing.
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Frankl on Life
"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible" -- Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, in one of the most powerful books of the last century, Man's Search for Meaning. He also wrote, in the same book, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
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Reed on Bad People
“The soul-crushing misery, the mass exodus to get out, the endless broken promises so endemic to socialism simply cannot be dismissed as the failures of a few bad people. There’s something rotten in the system itself. Indeed, the very ideas from which it springs are rotten. At socialism’s core is end-justifies-the-means, moral relativist, anti-individual and collectivist rubbish. Bad people are everywhere, but nothing brings them forth and licenses them to do evil more thoroughly than concentrated power and the subordination of morality to the service of a statist ideology. That is the essence of the socialist vision, the iron fist within the velvet glove that belies all the happy talk to the contrary” — economist, historian and think tank president Lawrence W. Reed.
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Friedman on the Drug War
“The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual’s own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it’s in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they’ll do you harm, why isn’t it all right to say you must not eat too much because you’ll do harm? Why isn’t it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you’re likely to die? Why isn’t it all right to say, ‘Oh, skiing, that’s no good, that’s a very dangerous sport, you’ll hurt yourself’? Where do you draw the line?” — economist Milton Friedman, author of Free to Choose, among many other works.
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