Tidewater Libertarian Party's Complete Quote Listing

If you have any suggestions for quotes that should be included in this list, please email them to webmaster@tidewaterlp.com.

The Declaration of Independence

#1 - “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The Constitution

#2 - “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” (Second Amendment)

Congressional Oath of Office

#3 - “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic...”

Edward Abbey

#4 - “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

Lord Acton

#5 - “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” (1887)

John Adams

#6 - “Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.” (1793)

#7 - “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”

John Quincy Adams

#8 - “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”

Samuel Adams

#9 - “It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in the people's minds.”

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

#10 - “A man should be upright, not be kept upright.”

Bernard Baruch

#11 - “Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing.”

Frédéric Bastiat

#12 - “And now that the legislators and do gooders have futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems. And try liberty...” (1850)

#13 - “Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.”

#14 - “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

#15 - “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”

Hilaire Belloc

#16 - “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.”

Senator Wallace F. Bennett

#17 - “[We] should not blame a gun itself for any crime or any acts of violence, any more than we can blame a pen for misspelling a word.” (Congressional Record, 5/16/1968)

Otto Von Bismarck

#18 - “Laws are like sausages. You sleep far better the less you know about how they are made.”

#19 - “My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution for their sake and interested in their welfare.”

Étienne de La Boétie

#20 - “It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly, that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”

Harry Browne

#21 - “You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad – in fact, to do anything it wants.”

Edmund Burke

#22 - “The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”

#23 - “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Mather Byles

#24 - “Which is better – to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?” Attributed to the Boston physician, 1770

Douglas Cardinal

#25 - “I'm not an answering machine, I'm a questioning machine. If we have all the answers, how come we're in such a mess?”

Marcus Tullius Ciceroca

#26 - “More laws, less justice.” (42 BC)

Winston Churchill

#27 - “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

#28 - “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.”

#29 - “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

#30 - “We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” (1903)

Tom Clancy

#31 - “What government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms, and killing people. It's not good at much else.” on Kudlow and Cramer 9/2/2003

Michael Cloud

#32 - “Government does not grow by seizing our freedoms, but by assuming our responsibilities.”

Frank Chodorov

#33 - “When asked by an audience member, 'But what will become of the elderly who cannot care for themselves?', Chodorov answered, 'They'll be allowed to die in the streets as was done in the past.' The questioner then asked, 'When was that ever done?', and Chodorov came back, 'Precisely!'” While speaking on the subject of welfare.

Confucius

#34 - “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

#35 - “When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty.”

David Crockett, Congressman 1827-35

#36 - “We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money.”

Hugh Downs

#37 - “This country is a one-party country. Half of it is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn't make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians.” (1997)

Bob Dylan

#38 - “A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.”

Thomas Edison

#39 - “There ain't no rules around here! We're trying to accomplish something.”

Albert Einstein

#40 - “A foolish faith in authority is the enemy of the truth.”

#41 - “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.”

#42 - “The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.”

#43 - “Thinking is hard work; that's why so few do it.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#44 - “We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#45 - “Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.”

#46 - “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

#47 - “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”

Epictetus

#48 - “All religions must be tolerated... for every man must get to heaven in his own way.”

#49 - “Only the educated are free.”

Bertie C. Forbes

#50 - “History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.”

Henry Ford

#51 - “As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.”

#52 - “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

Felix Frankfurter

#53 - “The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.” (Graves vs. New York; 1939)

Benjamin Franklin

#54 - “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

#55 - “The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.”

#56 - “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Mohandas Gandhi

#57 - “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless or, which is the same thing, corrupt.”

#58 - “In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.”

Tony Gaskins Jr.

#59 - “The only people mad at you for speaking the TRUTH are those living a lie. Keep speaking it!”

Charles de Gaulle

#60 - “In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.”

#61 - “Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.”

Joseph Goebbels

#62 - “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Hitler's Propoganda Minister

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#63 - “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

#64 - “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”

Emma Goldman

#65 - “If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.”

Barry Goldwater, US Senator

#66 - “Government should stay the hell out of people's business.”

William T. Gossett, President ABA

#67 - “The rule of law can be wiped out in one misguided, however well-intentioned, generation.”

Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post

#68 - “Truth and news are not the same thing.”

Alan Greenspan

#69 - “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.” Gold and Economic Freedom, written in 1966

#70 - “The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.” Gold and Economic Freedom, written in 1966

Robert Heinlein

#71 - “There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”

Patrick Henry

#72 - “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Napoleon Hill

#73 - “More gold has been mined from the thoughts of man than has ever been taken from the Earth.”

Adolf Hitler

#74 - “How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think.”

#75 - “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propoganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans...” Mein Kampf, Ch. 6

Dee Hock

#76 - “If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates', then you know nothing of leadership. You only know tyranny.”

Jacob Hornberger

#77 - “If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.” (1995)

Dresden James

#78 - “When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.”

Thomas Jefferson

#79 - “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.”

#80 - “A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” (1801)

#81 - “I believe the states can best govern our home concerns and the federal government our foreign ones.”

#82 - “I never consider a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”

#83 - “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

#84 - “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” (to Archibald Stuart, 1791. ME 8:276)

#85 - “If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”

#86 - “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

#87 - “The natural order of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

#88 - “The several states comprising the United States of America are not united on a principle of unlimited submission to their general government.”

Sen. Hiram Johnson

#89 - “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” Attributed from a speech in 1917

Bertrand de Jouvenel

#90 - “A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.”

Juvenal

#91 - “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Translated - Who watches the watchmen?

John F. Kennedy

#92 - “Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

#93 - “An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”

#94 - “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it.”

#95 - “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”

#96 - “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

#97 - “There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.”

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

#98 - “A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.”

Robert E. Lee

#99 - “A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know where it is today.”

Robert LeFevre

#100 - “If men are good, you don't need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don't dare have one.”

C.S. Lewis

#101 - “A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.” The Abolition of Man

#102 - “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

Abraham Lincoln

#103 - “You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”

Walter Lippmann

#104 - “Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.” (1937)

John Locke

#105 - “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his.” (1690)

Charles Mackay

#106 - “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

James Madison

#107 - “Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.”

#108 - “History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it's issuance.”

#109 - “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

#110 - “Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad.” In a letter to Thomas Jefferson

#111 - “There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation.”

Andre Marrou

#112 - “Liberals want the government to be your Mommy. Conservatives want government to be your Daddy. Libertarians want it to treat you like an adult.”

Karl Marx

#113 - “There is only one way to kill capitalism – by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.”

George Mason

#114 - “To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

Gerald Massey

#115 - “They must find it difficult... those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority.”

Margaret Mead

#116 - “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

H. L. Mencken

#117 - “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

#118 - “People do not want freedom. What people want is safety.”

#119 - “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the man they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

#120 - “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”

#121 - “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Michel Eyquem Montaigne

#122 - “Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.”

#123 - “The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them; a man may live long yet live very little.”

Montesquieu

#124 - “There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.” (1742)

Friedrich Nietzsche

#125 - “Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”

Anaïs Nin

#126 - “There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”

P.J. O'Rourke

#127 - “You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.”

Thomas Paine

#128 - “A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.”

#129 - “Government at its best is a necessary evil, and at its worst, an intolerant one.”

#130 - “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicene to the dead.”

#131 - “When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny.”

Blaise Pascal

#132 - “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction.”

General George S. Patton

#133 - “One has to choose a system and stick to it; people who are not themselves are nobody.” (Letter to George S. Patton Jr., June 6, 1944)

Ron Paul

#134 - “A true revolution has to be ideological. Revolutions can be violent, they can overthrow a government with nothing really improved. An ideologically positive revolution is what is necessary, and that's what we have going on in this country.”

Charles Peguy

#135 - “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”

Pericles

#136 - “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.” (430 BC)

Plato

#137 - “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore, do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement, this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.”

#138 - “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

#139 - “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” (circa 400 BC)

Pierre Proudhon

#140 - “Liberty is the mother of order, not its daughter.”

Thomas Pynchon

#141 - “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”

Ayn Rand

#142 - “The government was set to protect man from criminals – and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.”

Ronald Reagan

#143 - “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

#144 - “Government is not the solution, but rather the cause of our problems.”

#145 - “Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem.”

Thomas B. Reed

#146 - “One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.” (1886)

Tim Robbins

#147 - “There's always someone telling you not to do something. The main thing is just to ignore them.”

Will Rogers

#148 - “It ain't so much what a man doesn't know that causes him so many problems, but what he knows that ain't so.”

#149 - “Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.”

George Santayana

#150 - “Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.”

Johann von Schiller

#151 - “The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#152 - “A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand.” (c. 4BC - 65AD)

Shakespeare

#153 - “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

George Bernard Shaw

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

Papa Slavo

#155 - “If you want to stop crime in America, start in the White House and work your way down.” Mac Slavo's (of SHTFplan.com) father

Joseph Sobran

#156 - “Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.”

#157 - “Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money – only for wanting to keep your own money.”

Socrates

#158 - “Let him who would move the world, first move himself.”

#159 - “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Thomas Sowell

#160 - “What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.”

Herbert Spencer

#161 - “Society exists for the benefit of its members – not the members for the benefit of society.”

#162 - “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.” (1891)

Lysander Spooner

#163 - “Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property.
Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.
Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice towards others, and no interference with their persons or property.”

Ringo Starr

#164 - “Everything government touches turns to crap.”

Max Stirner

#165 - “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.”

Dr. Suess (Theodor Geisel)

#166 - “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”

Tacitus

#167 - “The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.”

Maggie Thatcher

#168 - “The trouble with socialism is that, eventually, you run out of other people's money.”

Henry David Thoreau

#169 - “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

#170 - “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” (Walden 1854)

#171 - “That government is best which governs least.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

#172 - “The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced ... to a single principle.”

Tolstoy

#173 - “Governments need armies to protect them from their enslaved and oppressed subjects.”

Lao Tsu

#174 - “The more laws and restrictions there are, the poorer the people become.”

Judge Gideon J. Tucker

#175 - “No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.”

Mark Twain

#176 - “First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He created school boards.”

#177 - “In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.” Notebook, 1935

#178 - “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

#179 - “No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” (1866)

Leonardo da Vinci

#180 - “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Voltaire

#181 - “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

#182 - “In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.” (1764)

#183 - “It is better to risk letting a guilty man go free, than to condemn an innocent one.”

#184 - “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

#185 - “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Joel F. Wade, Ph.D

#186 - “Compromising between freedom and tyranny is like compromising about what height of a cliff you should have to jump off. Once you accept the premise that you'll jump, you're already doomed.”

George Washington

#187 - “Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.”

#188 - “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

#189 - “Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

#190 - “The Constitution is the guide which I will never abandon.”

#191 - “The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.”

#192 - “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good.”

#193 - “There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily.”

John Wayne

#194 - “It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something.”

Thornton Wilder

#195 - “The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.”

The Wizard of Oz

#196 - “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

Cousin Woodman

#197 - “Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.”

Frank Zappa

#198 - “A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.”

#199 - “The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced.”

Anonymous

#200 - “Politics is the art of obtaining money from the rich and votes from the poor on the pretext of protecting each from the other.”

#201 - “When freedom is outlawed … Only outlaws will be free!”