Category Archives: Quotations Freedom

As constitutional scholar Roger Pilon has documented, even expenditures for the most …

As constitutional scholar Roger Pilon has documented, even expenditures for the most charitable of purposes were routinely spurned as illegitimate. In 1794, James Madison wrote disapprovingly of a $15,000 appropriation for French refugees: ‘I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.’ Stephen Moore
Between Power and Liberty, Director of Fiscal Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, March, 1997

If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me …

If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to be their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it — well, so does any burglar. There is only this difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act. Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, 1905-1982

To be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one’s …

To be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one’s weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. Robyn Davidson
Tracks

There is a recognition of the equality of rights among citizens in …

There is a recognition of the equality of rights among citizens in the pursuit of the ordinary avocations of life, and a declaration that all grants of exclusive privileges, in contravention of this equality, are against common right, and void. Mr. Justice Stephen Field
Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age, by Paul Kens. University Press of Kansas, 1997.