Mary McCarthy Quotes

The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will.

As government grows, freedom recedes.

Government is the natural enemy of freedom.

The function of State coercion is to override individual coercion, and, of course, coercion exercised by any association of individuals within the State. It is by this means that it maintains liberty of expression, security of person and property, genuine freedom of contract, the rights of public meeting and association, and finally its own power to carry out common objects undefeated by the recalcitrance of individual members.

You ardently strive for freedom, and I do wish you were free--but, rather than for your sake, so that government won't be.

It has been held, right up to the present day, that the freedom of individual must take second place to the security of the State.....

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…

There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.

As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individuals mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest details.

Individual liberty depends upon keeping government under control.

The bigger the State, the smaller the citizen

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?

Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.

The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents.

You have ceded the concept of your own rights. You've converted them into something you get as a revocable privilege from the government, something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has diminished the measure of liberty within a society.

Government money only pays for the "liberties" the government thinks you should have, and therefore it can determine how you exercise them. That turns liberties into privileges dispensed at the whim of the state.

In constitutional states, liberty is compensation for heavy taxes; in dictatorships, the subsititue is light taxes.

Although we give lip service to the notion of freedom, we know the government is no longer the servant of the people but, at last has become the people's master. We have stood by like timid sheep while the wolf killed - first the weak, then the strays, then those on the outer edges of the flock, until at last the entire flock belonged to the wolf.

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 individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

But on the other hand government takes away a certain amount of liberty and in some countries it takes away all of liberty. And it will, everywhere, if people who fight government do not fight government any longer.

Our government shouldn't tell us where to travel and where not to travel.