Quotes About Freedom

Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.

The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state.

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

Doctrines which can stand the trial of logic and reason can do without persecuting skeptics.

Romanticism is man's revolt against reason, as well as against the condition under which nature has compelled him to live.

A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.

Today the apologists of socialism are forced to distort facts and to misrepresent the manifest meaning of words when they want to make people believe in the compatibility of socialism and freedom.

The thesis of etatism that the members of the government and its assistants are more intelligent than the people, and that they know better what is good for the individual than he himself knows, is pure nonsense.

All that society can achieve in these fields is to provide an environment which does not put insurmountable obstacles in the way of genius's and makes the common man free enough from material concerns to become interested in things other than mere breadwinning... the foremost social means of making a man more human is to fight poverty. Wisdom and science and the arts the way of genius and makes the common man free enough thrive better in a world of affluence than among needy peoples.

Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning [socialism] is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.

Freedom and liberty always refer to interhuman relations. A man is free as far as he can live and get on without being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions on the part of other people. In the frame of society everybody depends upon his fellow citizens. Social man cannot become independent without forsaking all the advantages of social cooperation. The self-sufficient individual is independent, but he is not free. He is at the mercy of everybody who is stronger than himself.

The characteristic feature of militarism is not the fact that a nation has a powerful army or navy. It is the paramount role assigned to the army within the political structure. Even in peacetime the army is supreme; it is the predominant factor in political life. The subjects must obey the government as soldiers must obey their superiors. Within a militarist community there is no freedom; there are only obedience and discipline.

With all production, employment, and distribution of output completely under the monopoly control of the State, the fate and fortune of every individual would be at the mercy of the political authority. In addition, these earlier opponents of socialism had cogently argued that with the end of private property and freedom of enterprise, individuals would lose much of the self-interested motivation for industry, innovation, and work effort that exists in a market economy.

No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.

A metallic money, the augmentation or diminution of the quantity of metal available for which is independent of deliberate human intervention, is becoming the modern monetary ideal. The significance of adherence to a metallic-money system lies in the freedom of the value of money from State influence that such a system guarantees.

Stable government requires the free consent of those ruled. Tyranny, even the tyranny of benevolent despots, cannot bring lasting peace and prosperity. There

The first thing a genius needs is to breathe free air.

Production is "anarchistic.

In a society of free men the preservation of life and health are ends, not means. They do not enter into any process of accounting means.

Nikolai Bukharin [1888–1938], a Communist author who lived in a Communist country, wrote a pamphlet in 19175, in which he said, we asked for freedom of the press, thought, and civil liberties in the past because we were in the opposition and needed these liberties to conquer. Now that we have conquered, there is no longer any need for such civil liberties.

Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.

Mises showed that the end of private property would mean the end to economic rationality.

The alternative to the rule of law is the rule of despots.

Our whole civilization rests on the fact that men have always succeeded in beating off the attack of the re-distributors.