They came for the Fifth Amendment,
and I was silent because I owned no property involved in crimes

They came for the Sixth Amendment,
and I did not protest because I was innocent.

They came for the Second Amendment,
and I said nothing because I didn't own a gun.

And then they came for the First Amendment,
and I could say nothing at all.

[I]t is easier to show the disorder which must accompany the reform than the order which will follow it. The friends of the abuse cite particular instances; they name the persons and their workmen who will be disturbed, while the poor devil of a reformer can only refer to the general good, which must insensibly diffuse itself among the masses.

There are only two ways by which the means essential to the preservation, the adornment, and the perfection of life may be obtained - production and spoliation.

That which prevents the perfection of the social system (at least in so far as it is capable of perfection) is the constant effort of its members to live and prosper at the expense of each other.

When spoliation becomes a means of subsistence for a body of men united by social ties, in course of time they make a law which sanctions it, a morality which glorifies it.

Spoliation not only displaces wealth, but always destroys a portion.

The true and equitable law of humanity is the free exchange of service for service. Spoliation consists in destroying by force or by trickery the freedom of exchange, in order to receive a service without rendering one.

[I]t is in the nature of abuses to go as far as possible.

When might ceases to be right, and the government of mere strength is dethroned, Sophistry transfers the empire to cunning and subtlety. It would be difficult to determine which of the two tyrannies is most injurious to mankind.

[T]he means of existence of knaves is the credulity of their dupes. Turn whichever way you please, you always find the need of an enlightened public opinion. There is no other cure-all.

[T]he man who desires to re-establish property as an institution normal to most citizens in the State is working against the grain of our existing Capitalist society, while a man who desires to establish Socialism - that is Collectivism - is working with the grain of that society.

BELLOC, HILAIRE, The Servile State, Section 7, Easiest Solution

The proletarian, when the Collectivist (or Socialist) State is put before him, perceives nothing in the picture save certain ameliorations of his present condition...The whole scheme of Collectivism presents, so far as the proletarian mass of a Capitalist State is concerned, nothing unknown at all, but a promise of some increment in wages and a certainty of far greater ease of mind.

BELLOC, HILAIRE, The Servile State, Introduction

[The idealist social reformer] is out to cure what he sees to be the great immediate evils of Capitalist society. He is out to cure the destitution which it causes in great multitudes and the harrowing insecurity which it imposes upon all. He is out to substitute for Capitalist society a society in which men shall all be fed, clothed, housed, and in which men shall not live in a perpetual jeopardy of their housing, clothing, and food...This idealist social reformer...finds the current of his demand canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and barred; as to the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are open...the whole force of the current will run through the opportunity so afforded it; there will it scour and deepen its channel; there will the main stream learn to run...the whole Capitalist State can be rapidly and easily transformed into the Servile State, satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims and the more urgent demands of the social reformer whose ultimate objective indeed may be the public ownership of capital and land, but whose driving power is a burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses. When the transformation is complete there will be no ground left, nor any demand or necessity, for public ownership.

BELLOC, HILAIRE, The Servile State, Section 8, Making for Servile State

These two factors, then, the memory of an older condition of economic freedom, and the effect of a hope individuals might entertain of escaping from the wage-earning class, the two factors which might act most strongly against the acceptation of the Servile State by that class, have so fallen in value that they offer but little opposition to the third factor in the situation which is making so strongly for the Servile State, and which consists in the necessity all men acutely feel for sufficiency and for security.

BELLOC, HILAIRE, The Servile State, Section 8, Making for Servile State

The most potent and significant expression of statism is a State educational system. Without it, statism is impossible. With it, the State can, and has, become everything.

BLUMENFELD, SAMUEL L., Why the Schools Went Public

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

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

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the Federal inspector will be in every man's counting house. The law will of necessity have inquisitorial features, it will provide penalties. It will create a complicated machinery. Under it businessmen will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of Federal inspectors, spies and detectives will descend upon the state. They will compel men of business to show their books and disclose the secrets of their affairs. They will dictate forms of bookkeeping. They will require statements and affidavits. On the one hand the inspector can blackmail the taxpayer and on the other, he can profit by selling his secret to his competitor.

The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.

We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: "I can't fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about." Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility - blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty.

When opportunities shall offer (and many such will occur) of procuring a public advantage by overleaping restraints, confident in the uprightness of his intentions...he will not perceive, that in aiming at momentary advantage he strikes at the laws themselves, on which the safety of the Nation rests; and that those acts, so laudable when we only consider the motive of them, make a breach, at which tyranny will one day enter.

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us."

DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR, The Brothers Karamazov

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

Let us recall that in spite of America's participation in World War I to make the world safe for democracy, out of the war's ashes came communism, fascism, and Nazism. Let's also not forget that in spite of our participation in World War II to destroy totalitarian aggression, the greatest victor was Stalin's Soviet Union and the major outcome the expansion of communist totalitarianism to Eastern Europe, China, and other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Let us remember that in spite of the almost 100,000 American lives lost in Korea and Vietnam, communism was not defeated in either country. Let us keep in mind that in spite of our recent military campaigns in the Middle East and the Balkans in Europe, tyrants still reign and ethnic animosities and killings still continue.

Why do voters not see through the propagandistic smoke screen that is used to rationalize...legalized plunder? Tullock argues that it is because voters are "rationally ignorant." For any one voter, his ballot, in terms of its potential to make the difference in any election, is insignificant in relation to all the votes cast...Therefore, the average individual has little incentive to incur the intellectual expense to penetrate the political smoke screens.

Everybody is always in favour of general economy and particular expenditure.

The newsmen continue to imagine that you can have intellectual freedom without the free market. The businessmen continue to imagine that you can have the free market without intellectual freedom. Both are actually losing their liberty.

They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Today, there is wide agreement that socialism is a failure, capitalism a success. Yet...the bulk of the intellectual community almost automatically favors any expansion of government power so long as it is advertised as a way to protect individuals from big bad corporations, relieve poverty, protect the environment, or promote "equality."

The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument. And the emotional faculties are more highly developed in most men than the rational, paradoxically or especially even in those who regard themselves as intellectuals.

I have a feeling that at any time about three million Americans can be had for any militant reaction against law, decency, the Constitution, the Supreme Court, compassion and the rule of reason.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.

[Liberalism] came to be regarded as a "negative" creed because it could offer to particular individuals little more than a share in the common progress – a progress which came to be taken more and more for granted and was no longer recognized as the result of the policy of freedom...the basic tenets of liberalism was more and more relinquished. What had been achieved came to be regarded as a secure and imperishable possession, acquired once and for all.

[T]he only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men. In his anxiety to escape the irksome restraints which he now feels, man does not realize that the new authoritarian restraints which will have to be deliberately imposed in their stead will be even more painful.

You can have peace. You can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.

Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is the least to be cheap and is never free of cost.

I am not well versed in history, but I will submit to your recollection, whether liberty has been destroyed most often by the licentiousness of the people, or by the tyranny of rulers? I imagine, Sir, you will find the balance on the side of tyranny: Happy will you be if you miss the fate of those nations, who, omitting to resist their oppressors, or negligently suffering their liberty to be wrested from them, have groaned under intolerable despotism. Most of the human race are now in this deplorable condition...

[M]any thoughtful people assume that our difficulties are due to an irreconcilable conflict of Liberty with our complex Industrial Age, that the free human spirit which created this modern civilization has made its own Frankenstein’s monster. We must not conclude that ours is the only generation which has thought this, nor the first that has had to meet great perplexities. Men of every generation have envisaged their problems in terms of despair, but the dynamic impulses given to men from Liberty always have found tolerable solutions, so tolerable that a gigantic progress swept onward from generation to generation.

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined...The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.

If we examine the fate of wrecked republics over the world we shall find first a weakening of the legislative arm...It is in the legislative halls that Liberty commits suicide...For 200 years the Roman Senate continued as a scene of social distinction and noisy prattle after it had surrendered its responsibilities and the Roman State had become a tyranny.

If we study our own legislatures...we witness...the same turning of the people toward the executive arm, with consequent encroachment upon the militant safeguard to Liberty - legislative independence.

[A] step away from liberty itself impels a second step, a second compels a third.

[P]rivate fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on...And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Against us are... all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.

It is always fashionable to talk about a crisis. It gives those who use such terminology a special aura that they see the world more sharply than the rest of us, that they possess a noble vision of a better world, and that they know how to get there.

Increasingly it seems the biggest threat to American liberties isn't from terrorists, but rather from government officials intent on doing to our Constitutional liberties what the 9-11 terrorists did to the World Trade Center.

LIBERATOR ONLINE, THE, December 3, 2002

Power, according to its inherent nature, goes on increasing, until checked.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XIV

[P]eriods of material prosperity and public depression try a country's institutions. They are the most difficult times, and liberty is lost at least as often by stranding on pleasant shores as by wrecking on boiling breakers.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XXVII

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

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.

[P]eople are not usually deprived of their liberties all at once, but gradually, by one encroachment after another, as it is found they are disposed to bear them.

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.

What is wrong with our age is precisely the widespread ignorance of the role which these policies of economic freedom played in the technological evolution of the last two hundred years.

A nation may lose its liberties in one day, and not miss them for a century.

It is a lasting experience, that every man who has power is brought to the abuse of it. He goes on until he finds its limits.

MONTESQUIEU, Esprix des Loix

[T]he tyrant’s usual please of necessity: ‘no person has a right to the protection of a community or society he wishes to destroy.

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.

The State has thoroughly learned the lesson laid down by Septimius Severus, on his death-bed. "Stick together," he said to his successors, "pay the soldiers, and don't worry about anything else." It is now known to every intelligent person that there can be no such thing as a revolution as long as this advice is followed.

State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or honestly; yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid of the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for. Does social power mismanage banking-practice in this-or-that special instance - then let the State, which never has shown itself able to keep its own finances from sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness and corruption, intervene to "supervise"or "regulate"the whole body of banking-practice, or even take it over entire. Does social power, in this-or-that case, bungle the business of railway-management - then let the State, which has bungled every business it has ever undertaken, intervene and put its hand to the business of "regulating"railway-operation. Does social power now and then send out an unseaworthy ship to disaster - then let the State, which inspected and passed the Morro Castle, be given a freer swing at controlling the routine of the shipping trade. Does social power here and there exercise a grinding monopoly over the generation and distribution of electric current - then let the State, which allots and maintains monopoly, come in and intervene with a general scheme of price-fixing which works more unforeseen hardships than it heals, or else let it go into direct competition; or, as the collectivists urge, let it take over the monopoly bodily. "Ever since society has existed,"says Herbert Spencer, "disappointment has been preaching, 'Put not your trust in legislation'; and yet the trust in legislation seems hardly diminished."

Thus the State "turns every contingency into a resource" for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted - or as I believe our American glossary now has it, "conditioned" - to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the State's institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency; they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome and necessary for the public good.

Mr. Jefferson wrote in 1823 that there was no danger he dreaded so much as "the consolidation [i.e., centralization] of our government by the noiseless and therefore unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court."

Under the feudal State, living by the political means was enabled only by the accident of birth, or in some special cases by the accident of personal favour. Persons outside these categories of accident had no chance whatever to live otherwise than by the economic means...Under the merchant-State, on the contrary, the political means was open to anyone, irrespective of birth or position, who had the sagacity and determination necessary to get at it. In this respect, America appeared as a field of unlimited opportunity. The effect of this was to produce a race of people whose master-concern was to avail themselves of this opportunity. They had but the one spring of action, which was the determination to abandon the economic means as soon as they could, and at any sacrifice of conscience or character, and live by the political means.

The root-trouble was, in short, that there was no practicable way to avert a shattering collision between the logic of natural rights and popular sovereignty, and the economic law that man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion. This law governed the merchant-enterpriser in common with the rest of mankind. He was not for an organization that should do no more than maintain freedom and security; he was for one that should redistribute access to the political means, and concern itself with freedom and security only so far as would be consistent with keeping this access open. That is to say, he was thoroughly indisposed to the idea of government; he was quite as strong for the idea of the State as the hierarchy and nobility were. He was not for any essential transformation in the State's character, but merely for a repartition of the economic advantages that the State confers. Thus the merchant-polity amounted to an attempt, more or less disingenuous, at reconciling matters which in their nature can not be reconciled. The ideas of natural rights and popular sovereignty were, as we have seen, highly acceptable and highly animating to all the forces allied against the feudal idea; but while these ideas might be easily reconcilable with a system of simple government, such a system would not answer the purpose. Only the State-system would do that. The problem therefore was, how to keep these ideas well in the forefront of political theory, and at the same time prevent their practical application from undermining the organization of the political means. It was a difficult problem. The best that could be done with it was by making certain structural alterations in the State, which would give it the appearance of expressing these ideas, without the reality. The most important of these structural changes was that of bringing in the so-called representative or parliamentary system, which Puritanism introduced into the modern world, and which has received a great deal of praise as an advance towards democracy. This praise, however, is exaggerated. The change was one of form only, and its bearing on democracy has been inconsiderable.

There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means...The State, then, whether primitive, feudal or merchant, is the organization of the political means. Now, since man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion, he will employ the political means whenever he can - exclusively, if possible; otherwise, in association with the economic means. He will, at the present time, that is, have recourse to the State's modern apparatus of exploitation; the apparatus of tariffs, concessions, rent-monopoly, and the like. It is a matter of the commonest observation that this is his first instinct. So long, therefore, as the organization of the political means is available - so long as the highly-centralized bureaucratic State stands as primarily a distributor of economic advantage, an arbiter of exploitation, so long will that instinct effectively declare itself.

Freedom costs, and the costs of freedom in the areas of speech, press, worship, and assemblage are generally acknowledged by a significant number of articulate people. These freedoms are not under assault - not in this country, at any rate. In the case of economic freedom, the situation is different. Few people mistake the abuses of free speech for the principle itself; but the abuse of economic liberty loom so large in the modern eye that it cannot detect the market principle of which they are violations.

Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions.

The more men have to lose, the less willing are they to venture. The rich are in general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel.

[I]s the power who is jealous of our prosperity, a proper power to govern us?

The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

Q: If liberty's advantages are so great, why is it so often fleeting?

A: Lots of people, both for reasons of idealism and reasons of self-interest, promote expanded government power, which throughout history has been the greatest single threat to liberty. We are dealing with either idealists like egalitarians, who want to do various forms of leveling, or with interest groups trying to get subsidies and the like. They combine for constant pressure to expand government power. Liberty is always under assault and there will never be a total victory.

In the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right's least attractive practitioners.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!

Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.

Every act of intervention in the economic life of its citizens... is another break in the dike protecting the integrity of the individual as a free man or woman.

Give me control over a man's economic actions, and hence over his means of survival, and except for a few occasional heroes, I'll promise to deliver to you men who think and write and behave as I want them to.

Freedom of speech, of religion, of the press, of personal behavior. My thesis is that these freedoms are not likely to be long preserved in a society that has denied economic freedom to its individual members.

Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.

[T]here is the subtle corruption wrought by power, even upon the staunchest libertarian. In the last analysis, power and liberty are totally incompatible, and when one gains the upper hand, the other succumbs.

Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.

SALLUST (GAIUS SALLUSTIUS CRISPUS)

I’ve read the entire Constitution and can’t find a single word about the federal government having the power to decide what we smoke or what medicine we take.

We must remember that a right lost to one is lost to all.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world...Above [the] race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances - what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrow range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free...they strive to satisfy them both at once.

Wherever the poor direct public affairs and dispose of the national resources, it appears certain, that as they profit by the expenditure of the State, they are apt to augment that expenditure.

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE, Democracy in America, Chapter XIII

No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two-hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back again into bondage.

In recent years we have witnessed numerous marches on Washington in which one group or another has demanded new "rights." Frequently, such rights have not meant freedom from state control, but rather entitlement to state action, protection, or subsidy. In the process of yielding to the "will of the people" and creating new rights, the state invariably enlarges itself and its bureaucracy. Each new right seems to demand a new agency to guarantee it, administer it, or deliver it.