Wayne L. Morse Quotes

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

The individual is greater than the state.

Western democracy included individual liberty, as well as equality. The frontiersman was impatient of restraints. He knew how to preserve order, even in the absence of legal authority…. the individual was not ready to submit to complex regulations. Population was sparse, there was no multitude of jostling interests, as in older settlements, demanding an elaborate system of personal restraints. Society became atomic. There was a reproduction of the primitive idea of the personality of the law, a crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation of the law of the land.

A government must govern, must prescribe and enforce laws within its sphere or cease to be a government. Moreover, the individual must be independent and free within his own sphere or cease to be an individual. The fundamental question ... is now, and always will be through what adjustments, by what actions, these principles may be applied.

I stand for all those who feel that the government no longer understands the individual and no longer respects individual rights.

Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.

The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned - the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach - is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!.

Government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away.

I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association.

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

The proper balance between individual liberty and central authority is a very ancient problem.

The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.

Americans chose a limited government that exists to protect our rights, not to grant them.

America stands for individual liberty, but that means an ordered liberty.

Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Prohibition is a deathblow to the liberty of the individual …

Be most on guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

The individual is prior to society and society must be ordered to the good of the individual.

A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.

If conservatives really believed in individual liberty, as they endlessly claim — and if they used both halves of their brains — then they'd be libertarians. Instead, they sabotage themselves, and their cause, by constantly generating one spurious reason after another to deprive other people of their freedom.

Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives

Government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people; it wasn't intended to be all things to all people.

You see, what makes us different than the rest of the world fundamentally is our American respect and legal appreciation of individual rights and individual property. And, I emphasize - individual.