James Bovard on liberty in America

If you look at the rhetoric of the presidential campaign this year, you had Biden promising to make America more woke, you had Trump promising to make America great again.  What you didn't have is anybody promising to make America constitutional again or to make America free again.

So I really wonder how much love of liberty Americans still have, because it doesn't come up that often as a pure issue in presidential campaigns.  It really hasn't been a primary issue, I don't think, by a major candidate since the 1980s, since Ronald Reagan.

~ James Bovard, "Draining the Swamp with Jim Bovard," Competitive Enterprise Institute, 23:30 mark, January 9, 2025

Lew Rockwell on what the Mises Institute hopes to accomplish

I am often asked what the Mises Institute hopes to accomplish.  Both Mises and Rothbard were undoubtedly asked about their own hopes.  I think their answer would have been very simple: they hoped to write what is true and do what is right, and to do it with enthusiasm and vigor.  If we do nothing else, that is enough.  And yet, it is everything.

[...]

The difficult times in which we live are a reminder that our mission is far from complete.  The forces of statism are always waiting for an opportunity to rob us of the blessings of prosperity and liberty, of civilivation itself.

Mises believed that the best way to defeat the socialists was to say what is true.  Against the idea of liberty, he said, the fiercest sword of the despot is finally powerless.

~ Lew Rockwell, fundraising letter, November 25, 2021

(Too support the Mises Institute, click here.)

Thurgood Marshall on liberty and crises

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

~ Thurgood Marshall

Patrick Carroll on constitutions, culture and liberty

The lesson we ought to take from this [vaccine passports in Canada] is that constitutions by themselves do not actually protect people’s rights.  They are just pieces of paper.  What really matters is the culture, and specifically, the degree to which people in society value liberty. 

Consider the fact that many totalitarian regimes also had constitutions and bills of rights (such as the Weimar Constitution in Nazi Germany).  These documents were undoubtedly held in high esteem, but they likewise proved to be powerless when the prevailing culture became tyrannical. 

So while some say that we can preserve liberty if we just get the right law, constitutional amendment, or supreme court ruling, this is a false hope. 

Liberty lives and dies by the culture.  If the culture hates liberty, no government edict can preserve it. 

Then again, if the culture loves liberty, no government edict can take it away.

~ Patrick Carroll, "Vaccine Passports Have Come to Canada. Don’t Expect the Canadian Constitution to Stop Them," FEE.org, August 30, 2021

Lew Rockwell on the battle of ideas

Our ideas are unpopular.  We are in the minority.  Our views are not welcome by the regime.  They often fall on deaf ears of an indifferent public.  Big newspapers don't often care what we think.  In fact, they want to keep us out of their pages.  Politicians will always find us impractical at best, and threatening at worst. 

In short, we fight an uphill battle.  We must recognize this at the outset.  We are what Albert Jay Nock called the remnant, a small band of brothers who have special knowledge of theory and history and a concern for the well-being of civilization.  What we do with that knowledge and concern is up to us.  We can retreat or sell out, or we can use it as our battle cry and go forward through history to face the enemy.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Path to Victory," The Austrian, November-December 2020

Butler Shaffer on a free society

We may look to the day when the human spirit walks away from its self-imposed bondage.  In that day, men and women may discover that death in service to the state is not heroic; that obedience to power does not confer meaning upon one's life; and that a lengthened leg-chain is not to be confused with liberty.

~ Butler Shaffer, The Wizards of Ozymandias: Reflections on the Decline & Fall

Edmund Burke on how people relinquish liberty

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. 

~ Edmund Burke, British statesman, 1729-1797

Confucious on language

When words lose their meaning people will lose their liberty.

~ Confucious

Jeffrey Tucker on the natural order and liberty

People who can't imagine order over imposition always end up preferring power over liberty.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

Edmund Burke on the preconditions of liberty

Men are qualified for civil liberties, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites: in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity.

~ Edmund Burke

(From Chapter 2 of Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit.)

Lord Acton on liberty vs. license

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.

~ Lord Acton

Kevin Duffy on America's history

American history has passed through three phases: liberty, national greatness and now fairness.  Liberty has been lost in the process yet most Americans feel they are "free."

~ Kevin Duffy

Benjamin Franklin on democracy and liberty

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.  Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Rose Wilder Lane: "Is personal freedom worth the effort?"

The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden, and the risks, the unavoidable risks, of self-reliance.

VII

For each of us, the answer to that question is a personal one.  But the final answer cannot be personal, for individual freedom of choice and of action cannot long exist except among multitudes of individuals who choose it and who are willing to to pay for it.

Multitudes of human beings will not do this unless their freedom is worth more than it costs, not only in value to their own souls but also in terms of the general welfare and the future of their country, which means the welfare and the future of their children.

~ Rose Wilder Lane, "Give Me Liberty," 1944 (first published in 1936)

John Milton on how freedom and virtue are linked

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license.

~ John Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)

Murray Rothbard on liberty, power and civilization

My own basic perspective on the history of man...is to place central importance on the great conflict which is eternally waged between Liberty and Power... I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity. Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilized life.

~ Murray Rothbard

Statue of Liberty
1954-1968

Henry Hazlitt on the fight for liberty (70th birthday)

None of us are yet on the torture rack; we are not yet in jail...; what we mainly risk is merely our popularity, the danger that we will be called nasty names.

We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us... Even those of us who have reached and passed our 70th birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives dozing in the Florida sun.  The times call for courage.  The times call for hard work.  But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher.  They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization.

~ Henry Hazlitt, at his 70th birthday celebration, around November 28, 1964

Lew Rockwell on the cause of freedom, truth and lies, and smearing of entrepreneurs

Is the cause of freedom, private property, sound money, and - to be moderate - taking a meat axe to the government and all its works - irretrievably lost?  Do we have to sit back and accept a form of economic and social Marxism?

NEVER.

And why is that?  Because the truth, no matter how seemingly battered and bruised, still shines through.  It can never be wiped out, no matter how rotten the regime.  In the end, the truth will triumph over deceit.

Our opponents are the party of lies.  Lies about economics, history, and political philosophy.  Lies about the Fed and other government chains on society.  Lies about the nature of the state and its deeds.  Lies about the heroes to be admired and emulated, and the villains to be despised.

In the media and the classroom, entrepreneurs are smeared as greedy and destructive, when in fact they are heroes, essential to human flourishing.  Instead, we are supposed to worship politicians and officials who are no better than common thieves.  Yet far more destructive.

~ Lew Rockwell, April 26, 2016

Benjamin Franklin on trading liberty for security

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

~ Benjamin Franklin

America
1922-1925

Pope John XXX III on unity, liberty and charity

In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas. (Translated from the Latin as "unity in necessary things; liberty in doubtful things; charity in all things")

~ Pope John Paul XXIII in his encyclical Ad Petri Cathedram. The thought has been communicated by earlier theologians back to the 17th century and is is widely quoted in defence of theological and religious freedom.