There are words like Freedom
Sweet and wonderful to say.
On my heart-strings freedom sings
All day everyday.
There are words like Liberty
That almost make me cry.
If you had known what I knew
You would know why.
Langston Hughes, from The Panther & the Lash (1967).
Where there are no rights, there are no duties.
“I don’t know nothin’, but I suspect a lot of things.”
Nature having made men unequal, by giving stronger bodily and mental powers to one than to another, the end of government ought to be, to destroy this inequality by protecting the weak. Instead of which, it has always leaned to the opposite side, wearing itself out by disregarding the first principle of its organization.
Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), p. 7.
I interviewed Fidel Castro once and he immediately turned anti-American. Of course, it may have been coincidental.
Jack Paar, host of The Tonight Show (1957-1962), as quoted in Jesse Walker, “When Fidel Castro Went on The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show,” Reason, November 28, 2016.
The true and equitable law of humanity is the free exchange of service for service. Spoliation consists in destroying by force or by trickery the freedom of exchange, in order to receive a service without rendering one.
Frédéric Bastiat, “The Natural History of Spoliation,” in Economic Sophisms: Second Series (1848).
Society . . . as it becomes more enlightened, should be very careful not to establish bodies of men who must necessarily be made foolish or vicious by the very constitution of their profession.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter one.
If the greatest philosophers have been able to deceive themselves as to the iniquity of slavery, how much easier is it for farmers and manufacturers to deceive themselves as to the nature and effects of the protective system.
Frédéric Bastiat on protective tariffs, in Economic Sophisms: Second Series (1848), The Natural History of Spoliation.”
It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its Members’ personal view of what would make a “more perfect Union” (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a “more perfect world”) can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide.
It is not proper either to have a blunt sword or to use freedom of speech ineffectually.
Neither is the sun to be taken from the world, nor freedom of speech from erudition.
Pythagoras, as quoted Florilegium of Stobaeus, Thomas Taylor, translator (1818).