ON LIFE:
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Mike Tyson.
ON SCIENCE:
“I’d rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” Richard Feynman.
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Albert Einstein.
ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH
John Stuart Mill: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
“If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you. Because I am the worst.”
— Larry Flynt
ON SOCIALISM
“The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.” –Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus (1991)
“The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.” –Norman Mailer, as quoted in Peter’s Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977) by Laurence J. Peter
“Socialists cry ‘Power to the people’, and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean–power over people, power to the State.” — Margaret Thatcher
“In the twentieth century, governments murdered, as a prudent estimate, 272 million men, women, and children. It could be over 400 million.” R.J. Rummel, The Blue Book of Freedom 75 (2007).
“[S]ocialism is a new form of slavery.” –Alexis de Tocqueville, “Notes for a Speech on Socialism” (1848)
“We should wish socialism only on our enemies. Any society that embraces it will inevitably become sick and weak.” –Roger Roots
Capitalism “is the unequal distribution of blessings, Socialism is the equal distribution of misery.” –Winston Churchill
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” –Winston Churchill
“Socialism, in short is the violent abolition of the market, the compulsory monopolization of the entire productive sphere by the State.” –Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy and State.
ON GOVERNMENT
“There has never been a good government.” –Roger Roots
“As a government’s power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all corners of culture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens.” R.J. Rummel, The Blue Book of Freedom 101 (2007)
“I’d rather have a government that does less even if it costs a little more, than a government that does more with less.”—Kirsten Tynan
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” — Adolf Hitler
ON POLITICS
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” — Groucho Marx
ON RHETORIC
“[W]hen a politician on a subject implicating science, hard science, economic science, social science says the debate is over, you may be sure of two things. The debate is raging and he’s losing it.” George Will
“The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they [resist] every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent.” Ludwig von Mises
ON CAPITALISM
“In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary.” –Ayn Rand
“Fortune favors the free.” –Roger Roots (2015)
“There has never been a good government program.” –Roger Roots
“[P]rices are an instrument of communication and guidance which embody more information than we directly have.” –Frederick Von Hayek
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” –Adolf Hitler
“We detest governments in all their vile and despicable forms.” –Roger Roots
“The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: ‘Your money, or your life.'” –Lysander Spooner
“The smallest minority on earth is the individual.” –Ayn Rand
“The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.” –Ayn Rand
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” –Voltaire (1694-1778)
“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” –Henry Louis Mencken
“Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.”
–Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World
COURT QUOTES
“A tyrannical government calls everybody a traitor who shows the least unwillingness to be a slave. The party in power never fails, when it can, to stretch the law on that subject by construction, so as to cover its honest and conscientious opponents.” —S.W. Wn. Prod. Credit Ass’n v. Fender, 21 Wn.2d 349, 385, 150 P.2d 983 (1944).
ON PROPERTY RIGHTS:
“Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will…. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and… material progress are rooted.” Ludwig Von Mises, The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth p. 67.
LYSANDER SPOONER UNIVERSITY SLOGAN, BUMPER STICKERS, ETC.
“Think outside the cage!”
“No Speech Codes”
“Defy Government”
“Higher Learning for the Oppressed and Downtrodden”
