Lee Kuan Yew Quotes

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

Government's power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.

By definition, the moment one crosses from center to left, one accepts more government control of people's lives. Therefore, the further left society moves, the more there is government control over its citizens' lives. It is astonishing that this obvious fact is not universally acknowledged and that the Left has somehow successfully portrayed itself as preoccupied with personal liberty.

The American people have worn out their patience being told by their so-called bettors that you don't know how to live your lives the right way. We need to arrange things for you so you can do things better than you would do yourself.

As government grows, freedom recedes.

We must recognize that personal freedoms diminish as the welfare state grows. The price of more and more public programs is less and less private freedom.

We're being subject to incredible amounts of surveillance, the police are taking on draconian powers and violating our rights. I think this attempt to protect ourselves is ultimately going to founder because people don't like living inside prisons.

Individual liberty, the basic underpinning of American society, requires constant defense against the encroachment of the state.

Libertarians regard the state as the Supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public. All states everywhere, whether democratic, dictatorial, or monarchical, whether red, white, blue or brown.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

For two decades the state has been taking liberties, and these liberties were once ours.

You talked about national identity cards and the terrorism bill. We have made a government that has grown used to viewing us as subjects, has grown used to seeing its role as commanding us.

The basic principle that governs the relation between a state and its people --a total and unconditional subordination and submission of individuals and classes to the state…

'Socialize' means we turn more of our personal powers over to Big Brother, not free enterprise.

Never Forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anybody has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so he can do something to you that you wouldn't allow him to do if you were equipped to prevent it. This goes for burglars, muggers, and rapists, and even more so for policemen, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.

A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot - because the first leads inevitably to the second.

If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of "freedom".

Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.

It is worth noting that the people today who so vehemently wish to sweep religion from all public spaces and institutions are also the same people who consistently oppose freedom. They want only one God &emdash; the state, which of course they intend to run.

The socialized state is to justice, order, and freedom what the Marquis de Sade is to love.

The strongest of all arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.