Quotes from Leonard Read

The proper and limited use of government is to invoke a common justice and keep the peace - and that is all.

The solution to this problem [welfare-statism] must take a positive form: the restoration of a faith in what free men can accomplish.

...the greatest political problem facing the world today is...how to curb the oppressive power of government, how to keep it within reasonable bounds.

Governments resort to inflation with popular support because the people apparently are naïve enough to believe that they can have their cake and eat it, too.

Under both the welfare state and communism, the responsibility for the welfare, security, and prosperity of the people is presumed to rest with the central government.

If we remove the hope of profit as a means to alleviate misfortune - poverty, illness, misery, disaster - we shall increase our misfortunes and make them permanent.

The libertarian can have no truck with 'left' or 'right' because he regrets any form of authoritarianism - the use of police force to control the creative life of man.

Under our form of government we count, we do not weigh, opinion. The fact, therefore, that a certain sound principle may long be recognized as such by an economic-informed few is of little consequence. If the majority is wrong in its thinking, then the direction of the whole is more than likely to be equally wrong.

Half the world's rubber. c. Three-fourths the world's silk. d. One-third the world's coal. e. Two-thirds the world's crude oil. Is it not possible that there is some factor in our system that is responsible for this approach to a national plenty? Perhaps we think it is one thing when it really is something none of us identify. What is this "X" factor, this mystery factor? Is not a search for it advisable?