Adam Michnik Quotes

The right of private judgment is absolute in every American citizen.

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 constitution of a country should not violate the constitutions of its citizens.

The state was made for man, not man for state.

Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing.

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.

Every time the government grows we lose more of who we are.

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…

I am not about to be a party to anything having to do with the law that is going to destroy individual freedom and liberty in this country.

In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little.

There is the great, silent, continuous struggle: the struggle between the State and the Individual; between the State which demands and the individual who attempts to evade such demands. Because the individual, left to himself, unless he be a saint or hero, always refuses to pay taxes, obey laws, or go to war.

To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.

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.

You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.

An individual citizen cannot protect himself from the powers of large corporations or external governments. It is the responsibility of the government to protect its citizens.

[There is] a duty in refusing to cooperate in any undertaking that violates the Constitutional rights of the individual. This holds in particular for all inquisitions that are concerned with the private life and the political affiliations of the citizens.

The FDA calls certain substances "controlled." But there are no "controlled substances," there are only controlled citizens.

Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society.

The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

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.

I believe that people have a right to decide their own destinies; people own themselves. I also believe that, in a democracy, government exists because (and only so long as) individual citizens give it a temporary license to exist, in exchange for a promise that it will behave itself. In a democracy, you own the government. It doesn't own you.

Whether you have an abortion, what you put in your own body, with whom you have sex - these are not affairs of the state. A government does not exist to control the citizens. When it does, it is a tyranny, and must be fought. The tree of liberty, Jefferson warned us, must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots.