Walter Lippmann Quotes

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 with my sage and epigrammatic friend P. J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.

When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents.

My quarrel is not with the legitimate role of government but with the unlimited role of government.

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

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.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

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

I don't like the idea that the government has so much of a say in things.

The American people believe that we ought to control our government. On the other hand, we've seen government more and more controlling us

I do not expect any help for a libertarian revolution from any Government in the world…

Our devotion to individual freedom limits our readiness to give central government the power to override our traditional power structure.

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

Aside from sending someone to war or to prison, government s ability to make people involuntarily give over their money is its strongest exercise of authority over private citizens and their institutions.

The State practices "violence," the individual must not do so. The state's behavior is violence, and it calls its violence "law"; that of the individual, "crime".

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

Governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people.

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.

The fact throughout history is that whenever government dominates the economic affairs of its citizenry, a free society is eroded, then destroyed, and a minority government ensues. Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.

The Constitution exists precisely so that opinions and judgments, including esthetic and moral judgments about art and literature, can be formed, tested, and expressed. What the Constitution says is that these judgments are for the individual to make, not for the Government to decree, even with the mandate or approval of a majority. Technology expands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the Government is best positioned to make these choices for us.

[People] don't like the government telling them what to do or telling them how to live their lives.

Every step we take towards making the State our Caretaker of our lives, by that much we move toward making the State our Master.