Freedom

"Kidnap me and take me away. Throw me across the back of your bike and show me what it feels like to have the wind in your face and the sun on your skin, day in and day out. If it's anything at all like this then it must be heaven on earth. "

"The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

"If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them."

"In this confusion we begin to see what lies behind John Paul II's startling warning about democracy "effectively mov[ing] towards a form of totalitarianism." It begins to happen at a practical level when we simultaneously hold that rights which arise from the dignity of the person are also a matter of "bargaining." New rights can be claimed or created, and whatever privileges can be negotiated around them are then secured by reference to human dignity, even when these new rights are directly contrary to the human dignity of some, for example, the unborn or the elderly sick. This confusion about the nature of rights debases their currency and undermines the first principles of democracy. Such freedom gradually becomes a tyrannical "freedom of the 'the strong' against the weak, who have no choice but to submit."

"Bureaucrats complicate. It gives them more work to do. It gives them job security. It means promotions as ever more bureaucrats are added to the Ministry of Redundancy."

"Be wary of those propagating too much about liberty, ideology, and civility; they just might be oppressors in the making."

"... So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington, through the Captial of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed!"

"...the freedom to bear arms may be righteously rejected to encourage the preservation of all corporeal forms of life."

"Why must we cling to those who walk away instead of granting freedom? We must give the same liberty God gives to prodigals-an ability to let them go-or we'll be perennially bound to others for our happiness and effective service."

"I am an aristocrat," Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. "I love liberty; I hate equality."

"Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases."

"Perhaps worse still is what liberal societies might do to themselves in the face of this new and different threat [of terrorism]. They begin, by small but dangerous increments, to cease to be as liberal as they once were. They begin to restrict their own hard-won rights and freedoms as a protection against the crminial minority who attempt (and as we thus see, by forcing liberty to commit suidcide, succed in doing) to terrorise society."

"Either ‘the group’ is superior or the individual is superior. Marxism, socialism, fascism, and pure democracy are all forms that give power to ‘the group’ and then use violence to force individuals to obey the dictates of ‘the group’. The concept of liberty is one in which the individual - in the exercise of his unalienable rights - is superior to every and all powers. That is what the Founders intended. That is what we are supposed to have under the ‘contracts’ of the Declaration of Independence and the state and federal constitutions. That is what I am entitled to as an American. That is what I insist upon. And that is what I will kill for."

"Liberty is freedom constrained only by our responsibility to respect the equal rights of others."

"The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education."

"The limits of freedom of expression is tautological: it ends at the point where it begins to affect the freedom of expression of others."

"Yet basically, libertarians are for freedom and liberty forindividuals, while recognizing that in order to be free we must also beprotected. Your freedom to swing your arms ends at my nose."

"Promote the voluntary family; voluntarism is the only known cure for abuses of power - in politics, the economy or the family."

"There was something melancholic about that symbol of their nation's promise of freedom, a bell with a chipped mouth and cleft body."

"The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but on the forcible appropriation of the fruits of others' labor."