Albert J. Nock Quotes

For why should my freedom be judged by another’s conscience?

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

Every man must have freedom, must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices, for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

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.

You will not make a man wiser by taking freedom of action from him. A man can only learn when he is free to act.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Free nations of the world cannot allow Taiwan, a beacon of democracy, to be subdued by an authoritarian China.

We have built our State on the freedom of personal adventure.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

All I'm for is the liberty of the individual.

My experience and what scant understanding of politics I possess have convinced me that our peoples will only find well-being under compulsion; but my repugnance for compulsion is so great that I am loath to employ it even to achieve their well-being.

It imperils what I conceive to be the underlying, the very first principles of this Republic. It is in conflict with the right of our people to govern themselves free from all restraint, legal or moral, of foreign powers....

It would be better that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober.

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is of right, absolute.

In democracies the people seem to act as they please.

My freedom is more important than your good idea.

I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow …. Liberty … consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature …

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.

Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.

I am a believer in liberty. That is my religion — to give to every other human being every right that I claim for myself, and I grant to every other human being, not the right — because it is his right — but instead of granting I declare that it is his right, to attack every doctrine that I maintain, to answer every argument that I may urge — in other words, he must have absolute freedom of speech.

A free People will be showing that they are so, by their Freedom of Speech

The spirit of liberalism is to create free men; it is not the regimentation of men.

The fact that free men persist in the search for the truth is the essential difference between Communism and Democracy.

The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people's energy, intellect, and virtues.