Quote of the Day

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. 
– Jeannette Rankin

Quote of the Day

When the rich make war it's the poor that die. 
– Jean-Paul Sartre

Quote of the Day

The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny.
– William Ellery Channing (1780-1842)

Quote of the Day

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few … No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
– James Madison

Quote of the Day

There never was a good war or a bad peace.
– Benjamin Franklin (1773)

Quote of the Day

I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war.
– Thomas Jefferson (1823)

The True Nature of Taxation - Rod Rojas - Mises Daily

The True Nature of Taxation - Rod Rojas - Mises Daily

Quote of the Day

To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. . .I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.
– President Thomas Jefferson

Quote of the Day

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. 
– C. S. Lewis

Quote of the Day

[On ancient Athens]: In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. 
– Edward Gibbon

Quote of the Day

The power to tax is the power to destroy.
– John Marshall

Quote of the Day

Liberty is not a means to a political end. It is itself the highest political end.
– Lord Acton

Quote of the Day

Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
– P.J. O'Rourke

Quote of the Day

Everything government touches turns to crap.
– Ringo Starr

Quote of the Day

The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, "See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk".
– Harry Browne

Quote of the Day

The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words. – The Atlanta Journal

Quote of the Day

In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty.
– Leo Tolstoy

Quote of the Day

~Thomas Jefferson~ in a letter to Isaac McPherson

Aug. 13, 1813: ...If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Quote of the Day

As you increase the cost of the license to practice medicine, you increase the price at which the medical service must be sold and you correspondingly decrease the number of people who can afford to buy the service.
– William Pusey, then president of the American Medical Association

Quote of the Day

Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.
– Milton Friedman

Quote of the Day

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
– Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day

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. 
– Dresden James

Quote of the Day

The pattern is as old as human life. The new rulers use more and more force, more police, more soldiers, trying to enforce more efficient control, trying to make the planned economy work by piling regulations on regulations, decree on decree. The people are hungry and hungrier. And how does a man on this earth get butter? Doesn't the government give butter? But government does not produce food from the earth; Government is guns … they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use.
– Rose Wilder Lane

Quote of the Day

In almost all matters, the real question should be: why are we letting government handle this?
– Harry Browne

Quote of the Day

People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name of protecting us.
– Joseph Sobran

Quote of the Day

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money – if a gun is held to his head.
– P.J. O'Rourke

Quote of the Day

Politicians can't give us anything without depriving us of something else. Government is not a god. Every dime they spend must first be taken from someone else.
– Gary Asmus

Quote of the Day

… thou shall not steal, even by majority vote …
– Gary North

Quote of the Day

Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks. The compelling issue to both conservatives and liberals is not whether it is legitimate for government to confiscate one's property to give to another, the debate is over the disposition of the pillage.
– Walter Williams

Quote of the Day

Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation.
– Fletcher Knebel

Quote of the Day

We are living in a sick society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them.
– William L. Comer

Quote of the Day

The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
– Ayn Rand

Quote of the Day

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.
– Dresden James

*Public* Schools

Zero Tolerance Policies: Are the Schools Becoming Police States? by John W. Whitehead

I'm fine with a private establishment setting whatever rules they like. But a public school is not a private establishment. Every single person there is a government employee and is bound by the threat of force to comply with government regulations. And while I believe that the majority of educators are noble and amazing people, some are not. And the problem is the system is set up so that those few have the power to rob every one of our children of their God given rights in the name of the greater good. Public schools ARE part of the state, no matter what any one wants to believe. "Public" means the state gets final say in what goes on. Curriculum, policy, funding; all decided by bureaucrats who wouldn't be caught dead sending their kids anywhere but private school. The state *IS* guns. So I'd definitely agree with this article; our sense of reality is a little skewed if we're more terrified of a kid with an airsoft gun than of grown men with standard issue 9mms on their hips and the law telling them to use them if anyone protests enough.

Quote of the Day

Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women?
– Martin Luther

Quote of the Day

If even one new drug of the stature of penicillin or digitalis has been unjustifiably banished to a company's back shelf because of exceedingly stringent regulatory requirements, that event will have harmed more people than all the toxicity that has occurred in the history of modern drug development. – William Wardell

Quote of the Day

Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison.
– John Hardwick

Quote of the Day

It is indeed a singular thing that people wish to pass laws to nullify the disagreeable consequences that the law of responsibility entails. Will they never realize that they do not eliminate these consequences but merely pass them along to other people? The result is one injustice the more and one moral the less.
– Frederic Bastiat

Quote of the Day

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
– Groucho Marx

Quote of the Day

Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenseless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will perform them.
– Lysander Spooner

Quote of the Day

When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.
– James Dale Davidson

Quote of the Day

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.
– Alexis De Tocquiville

Quote of the Day

The Government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.
– Ronald Reagan

Quote of the Day

Government control gives rise to fraud, suppression of Truth, intensification of the black market and artificial scarcity. Above all, it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative, it undoes the teaching of self-help...
– Gandhi

Quote of the Day

If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.
– Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

 The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all.
– H. L. Mencken

Quote of the Day

Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man – in temperament, character, and capacity – and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.
– Frank Chodorov

Quote of the Day

However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible. 
– Herbert Spencer 

Quote of the Day

To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused.
– Lord George Lyttleton

Quote of the Day

Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.
– US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991

Excellent LDSLiberty Article

The Moral Question of Government

Quote of the Day

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the law," because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
– Thomas Jefferson

Quote of the Day

The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced. If the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt, people must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 BC

Quote of the Day

Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force!

- Barbie (Toy Story 3)

Quote of the Day

As you may have heard, the U.S. is putting together a constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? Think about it – it was written by very smart people, it's served us well for over two hundred years, and besides, we're not using it anymore.
– Jay Leno

Quote of the Night

"I am weary of the President's unspoken premise that only government--indeed, only the federal government--can accomplish good in our society."
- William Redpath
(See full article "Libertarians respond to State of the Union Address")

Also gotta love John Stossel

And then from me:
I've learned to know better than to even attempt to watch the State of the Union Address. It's so far from being worth the anxiety attack and the compulsive desire to bang my head repeatedly on the coffee table. I know our current government is backwards, hearing the president reiterate just how backwards, and in what specific ways, just makes me want to scream.

Quote of the Day

Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee.
– F. Lee Bailey

Quote of the Day

All the fiery rhetoric of the Founders was directed at a "tyrant" who taxed his subjects at a rate of about three percent. Today, we in "the land of the free" are taxed at about 50 percent when you add federal, state, and local taxes. What kind of government would do this? A dictatorship would.
– Doug Newman 

Quote of the Day

The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.
- Larry Hardiman

Quote of the Day

The American Dream was not about government's taking huge sums of money (under the label of "taxation") from citizens by force. The American Dream was about individualism and the opportunity to achieve success without interference from others.
– Robert Ringer

Quote of the Day

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
– James Fenimore Cooper

Quote of the Day

Society exists for the benefit of its members – not the members for the benefit of society.
– Herbert Spencer

Quote of the Day

I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it.
-Voltaire

The Flag

This is a great article. Hits the nail on the head.

Misguided Patriotism and the Pledge of Allegiance

Quote of the Day

Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
- Mikhail Bakunin