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.
There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.
When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.
Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.
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.
The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.
Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part.
Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.
Were it necessary to bring a majority into a comprehension of the libertarian philosophy, the cause of liberty would be utterly hopeless. Every significant movement in history has been led by one or just a few individuals with a small minority of energetic supporters.
When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
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.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.
The State calls its own violence, law; but that of the individual, crime.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
That government is best which governs least.