William E. Gladstone Quotes

Liberty is not collective. It is personal.

Collectivism and freedom are mortal enemies. Only one will survive.

A modern liberal is someone who doesn't care what you do, as long as it's compulsory.

It is necessary that we stop, once for all, this ignorant meddling with other people's business. Each individual must be left free to follow his own path.

Trying to be a socialist and a libertarian is obviously a very difficult balancing act, which nobody has pulled off too successfully in this century.

Our lives are bound by physical limits, familial ties, political conditions, and geographical restrictions. Individual freedom takes us beyond them all.

I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there's something wrong, pass a law and do something about it.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.

Socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state.

No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next -- if not a damn sight better.

The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes - more important than gold or houses or lands - more important than art or science - more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.

[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.

For one to be free there must be at least two.

Liberalism is really piecemeal socialism, and socialism always attacks three basic social institutions: religion, the family, and private property. Religion, because it offers a rival authority to the state; the family, because it means a rival loyalty to the state; and property, because it means material independence of the state.

Freedom has been privatized - it is how you dress, what your sexual orientation is, choosing your own life. That's fine. But that is not what Thomas Jefferson was talking about.

While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble.

Freedom is like taking a bath: You got to keep doing it every day.

You were born free by accident. You live free by choice. To die free is your responsibility.

The first freedom is to be in possession of yourself - to own yourself, to not be subject to the will of somebody else. In a capitalist society, that means having a certain economic wherewithal so that you can do what you wish to do without having to ask permission.

I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself.

Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.

Whoever then wishes to be free, let him neither wish for anything nor avoid anything which depends on others: if he does not observe this rule, he must be a slave.

To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.