Benjamin Tucker Quotes

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.

Remember, freedom is always taken, never given.

If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy . . . to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous . . . let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb

Light and liberty go together.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.

The world will not know liberty until all that is religious and political is transformed into something simple and human and made susceptible to criticism and denial.

A country where every man, be he fool or wise, is free to speak that which is in him, can never suffer a revolution.

Learning has freed more men than all the armies in human history.

I do not believe that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries of Europe

Literacy has fueled most of the freedom movements in the last centuries.

Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together.

The most repressive societies have always restricted speech the most — and when people are finally able to speak, they often call for change.

The country is moving to a more open society.

The Arab Spring, nobody's in the streets demonstrating for radical Islam; they're in the streets with a window of democracy. They want our political reform, our social justice, and our economic opportunity.

The fight for democracy is a long-term battle.

I am rather proud of my modest contribution to bringing democracy home.

Thought ... is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately ... no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible.

There should be no political prisoners in a democratic country.

Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are ... the right to believe what one chooses, the right to differ from his neighbor, the right to pick and choose the political philosophy he likes best, the right to associate with whomever he chooses, the right to join groups he prefers.

The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.

Light has spread, and even bayonets think.

If you do not force political freedom, economic freedom will be stymied sooner or later.

We can't impose freedom, but we can eliminate roadblocks to freedom, and to allow free societies to develop.

This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe. at least the enlightened part of it, for light & liberty go together.