Tom Stoppard Quotes

I do think there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom.

Every time you pass a law, it is a little bite out of freedom.

The property a man has in his own industry, is violated, whenever he is forbidden the free exercise of his faculties or talents, except insomuch as they would interfere with the rights of third parties.

Liberty is always freedom from the government.

What some people term Freedom is nothing else than a liberty of saying and doing disagreeable things. It is but carrying the notion a little higher, and it would require us to break and have a head broken reciprocally without offense.

The Product of Freedom and Security is a constant (F X S = k). Giving up freedom for security is beginning to look naive.

Marriage is going to disappear, should disappear. And now the point is coming in the history of humanity where it becomes possible that marriage can disappear. It is already an outmoded phenomenon, it has lived too long and it has created nothing but misery. Marriage should disappear and love should flower again. One should live with insecurity and freedom. That I call intelligence.

I really didn't know much about the Libertarians. I knew they were for less government and more individual freedom. I liked that.

Liberty is too priceless to be forfeited through the zeal of an administrative agent.

Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society. Therefore we have a long history of freedom, where people try to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual - this freedom is necessary for the individual.

Liberty, understood by materialists as the right to do or not to do anything not directly injurious to others, we understand as the faculty of choosing, among the various modes of fulfilling duty, those most in harmony with our own tendencies.

Here in America, government began as a tool to assure freedom. It gradually turned into a hideously expensive political toy designed to redistribute your wealth and control most aspects of your business and private life.

Libertarian: everyone leaves everyone else alone

I'm a free person; I feel terribly free. They could put me in chains and I still would be free because my thoughts would be mine - and that's all I want to have.

People mostly do as they like, and that would be fine if they'd let other people do the same.

The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.

There is a doctrine whispered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand.

Bush and the corporate kleptocrats have stomped on too many people and left too many people out of the system, and those people are now in rebellion. It's not just poor people they are holding down but the middle class, as well. I have a favorite bumper sticker I saw on a pickup truck last year in Austin. It said, "Where are we going? And what am I doing in this hand basket?"

The question isn't whether you have a good master or a bad master, it's to be your own master. That is the dignity of humanity.

For libertarians, freedom entails the right of people to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful. For conservatives, freedom entails the right of government to do just about anything it wants, even if its conduct is violent.

Don't call it freedom, unless it includes the freedom to be absolutely disgusting.

A lofty sense of independence is, in man, the best privilege of his nature.

I am absolutely convinced, you never have to give up any of your freedoms in order to be secure.

My personal credo as a libertarian conservative: I think all attempts to reform your fellow-citizens or tell them how to live their lives are arrogant and tyrannical. THAT'S why I oppose Leftism. I want people to be free to manage their own lives. Reform is just authoritarianism. People are not playthings for anybody's theories or obsessions.

I love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man.