Liberty

Thomas Sowell once said, “Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.” There’s a tendency nowadays to push the government to meet our every need and ignore the price we must pay for such a demand. The idea of scarcity, tradeoffs, or even sacrifice seems to be a thing of the past. We’ve compiled some of our favorite quotes from thinkers who understood the importance of liberty, the dangers of big government, and why freedom stands alone on the hierarchy of values.

“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Benjamin Franklin

“Better to die fighting for freedom than be a prisoner all the days of your life.”

Bob Marley

“The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth… Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.”

H.L. Mencken

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

George Bernard Shaw

“Give me liberty or give me death.”

Patrick Henry

“You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.”

Malcolm X

“What light is to the eyes – what air is to the lungs – what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.”

Robert G. Ingersoll

“Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”

Friedrich A. Hayek

“Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.”

Nicolas Gomez Davila

“There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”

Ronald Reagan

“Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”

Ayn Rand

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”

Sigmund Freud

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Frederick Douglass

“The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

Milton Friedman

“May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.”

Peter Marshall

“A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

Milton Friedman

“Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.”

G.K. Chesterton

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

Soren Kierkegaard

“Virtually every freedom you have is at the price of discipline.”

Jordan Peterson

“It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”

P.J. O’Rourke

“I’d rather be a poor master of my own fate than a rich servant of someone else’s.”

Michael Caine

“America traditionally represents the greatest possibility of someone going from nothing to something. Why? In theory, if not practice, the government stays out of the way and lets individuals take risks and reap rewards or accept the consequences of failure. We call this capitalism — or, at least, we used to.”

Larry Elder