A man who would consider himself a bandit if, pistol in hand, he prevented me from carrying out a transaction that was in conformity with my interests has no scruples in working and voting for a law that replaces his private force with the public force and subjects me, at my own expense, to the same unjust restrictions.

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.

[J]ust as one cannot win a game of chess against an opponent who will not make any moves—and just as one cannot argue mathematically with a person who will not commit himself to any mathematical statements—so moral argument is impossible with a man who will make no moral judgements at all . . . . Such a person is not entering the arena of moral dispute, and therefore it is impossible to contest with him. He is compelled also—and this is important—to abjure the protection of morality for his own interests.

The belief that good ends are attainable through evil means is one of the most vicious concepts of the ages. The political blueprint, The Prince, written around the year 1500 by Machiavelli, outlined this notorious doctrine. And for the past century it has been part and parcel of the kit of tools used by the Marxian communist-socialists to mislead people. Its use probably is as old as the conflict between temptation and conscience, because it affords a seemingly rational and pleasant detour around the inconveniences of one’s conscience.

(1) Thou shalt not steal. (2) Thou shalt not covet. Steal what? Covet what? Private property, of course. What else could I steal from you, or covet of what is yours? I cannot steal from you or covet what you do not own as private property. Thus we find that the individual’s right to private property is an unstated assumption which underlies the Decalogue.

[W]herever the Welfare State is involved, the moral precept, "Thou shalt not steal," becomes altered to say: "Thou shalt not steal, except for what thou deemest to be a worthy cause, where thou thinkest that thou canst use the loot for a better purpose than wouldst the victim of the theft."

While we are good and righteous persons in our individual conduct in our home community and in our basic moral code, we have become thieves and coveters in the collective activities of the Welfare State in which we participate and which many of us extol.

Forgotten, it seems, by many who so much admire Christ, is the fact that he did not resort to theft in acquiring the means of his material benefactions. Nor did he advocate theft for any purpose - even for those uses most dear to his beliefs.

[T]he ethics produced by collectivism will be altogether different from the moral ideals that lead to the demand for collectivism.

Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.

These horrid examples quoted to us daily are mostly violations of simple honesty or actions through the loopholes of the law and the Ten Commandments and are not the bases of our economic or social system. If they were we should have perished some generations ago.

The disguised or open objective of Socialism is equality in income, wages or economic rewards. The tenet of equality in true Liberalism is a tenet of equality in birth, equality before the law, and equality of opportunity as distinguished from equality of reward for services.

True Liberalism insists that to equalize rewards and possession of material things robs the individual of free imagination, inventiveness, risk, adventure, and individual attainment, development of personality, and independence from a monotony that would sentence the soul to imprisonment. It denies the Socialist contention that men will be more free when compelled to work under, and to work for, only one employer - the government.

[I]mportant as systems and institutions, principles and bills of rights are, they still demand rational and moral beings.

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

What a man does is always aimed at an improvement of his own state of satisfaction. In this sense - and in no other - we are free to use the term selfishness and to emphasize that action is necessarily always selfish. Even an action directly aiming at the improvement of other people’s conditions is selfish. The actor considers it as more satisfactory for himself to make other people eat than to eat himself.

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

[T]he advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better.

Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.

I oppose any doctrine which proposes the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, such as communism, socialism, the welfare state, fascism, Nazism and modern liberalism.

There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

The first stage of wisdom requires that we understand the virtues and how to live with them. Integrity, that is, fidelity to one’s highest conscience, is foremost and basic. Next is humility–in the sense of freeing oneself from be-like-meness. These prime virtues, if understood and practice, impart a rare wisdom: a sensitive and acute realization that a human being is a man and not a demigod.

If philanthropy is not voluntary, it destroys liberty and justice. The law can give nothing that has not first been taken from its owner.

[T]he most important part of the case for economic freedom is not its vaunted efficiency as a system for organizing resources not its dramatic success In promoting economic growth, but rather its consistency with certain fundamental moral principles of life itself.

[T]he would-be controller can always find reasons why it might seem expedient to control the individual; unless slowed down by some general feeling that it is immoral to do so, he will usually have his way.

We measure our deeds and actions with two different yardsticks of morality. We are quick and severe in the condemnation of the misdeeds our neighbor commits. But we fail to judge at all or at least with the same severity our own actions through the body politic.

We condemn a neighbor for deceit, theft, robbery, and other crimes against his fellow men; but we fail to judge ourselves for confiscatory taxation, nationalization, and seizures of private industries by government, our political instrument.

The test of tolerance comes when we are in a majority; the test of courage comes when we are in a minority.

...Moses reduced the teachings of Abraham to a written code of moral law. Known as the "Ten Commandments," it stands today as the first and greatest document of individual freedom in the recorded history of man. Each of the Ten Commandments is addressed to the individual as a self-controlling person responsible for his own thoughts, words, and acts. And each of them recognizes liberty and freedom as inherent in the nature of man.