Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

We have to recognize that the freedom of the individual has to be protected not only from the power of the state, but even more so from economic and societal power.

The Left regards the Constitution as defective and outmoded - in part because it impedes the government's ability to control institutions, like churches and families, which stand between the state and individuals.

The Left have always preferred the state to the family.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

Reduced to its lowest terms, the great struggle which now rocks the whole earth more and more takes on the character of a struggle of the individual versus the state.

Who can be against progress, after all? But it's a fraudulent use of the word - because for the Progressive, progress is marked not be how free you are, but how much government can 'do' for you.

But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both left and right believe.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

The passion and will for freedom is always contradicted by the necessity of the state.

We are gong down the road to stateism. Where we will wind up, no one can tell, but if some of the new programs seriously proposed should be adopted, there is danger that the individual-whether farmer, worker, manufacturer, lawyer, or doctor-will soon he an economic slave pulling an oar in the galley of the state.

The state can destroy families, but it can rarely save families.

A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men, no great thing can really be accomplished.

People who believe in governmental regulation and intervention in life—for them government is a church.

Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind

The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favored the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded, individualism.

It really is this: you are either for liberty, you're for freedom, and you're for living how you want to live without infringing and impugning on anyone else's rights, or you want the state to deal with everything.

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.

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.

We have passed the time of ... the laisser-faire [sic] school which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force.

A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot - because the first leads inevitably to the second.

If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.

Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say "But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time.

The power of the State must be invoked for restoring economic freedom just as it has been invoked for destroying economic freedom.

[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.

It is no accident that wherever the State ha taken economic decision away from the citizen, it has deprived him of his other liberties as well.