It is wasteful for the government to commandeer resources from the private sector during good times, and it’s even more harmful when the government kicks the economy during a recession.
Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., Contra Krugman: Smashing the Errors of America’s Most Famous Keynesian (2018), p. 18.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-1783), Query XVII, p. 169.
What people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise.
Barbara Jordan, Commencement Address, Harvard University (June 16, 1977), as cited in Let me tell you what I’ve learned: Texas Wisewomen Speak, PJ Pierce, University of Texas Press (2010), p. 16.
Francis Amasa Walker, Money in Its Relation to Trade and Industry (1889).
Paying debts is always a disagreeable necessity.
Note the difference between a right and a privilege. A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never. Privilege, in the abstract, does not exist; there is no such thing. Rights recognized, privilege is destroyed.
Voltairine De Cleyre, “The Economic Tendency of Freethought,” in Liberty Vol. XI, #25 (February 15, 1890).
I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.
George Orwell on his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 4 p. 564.