The next time you download a book on Kindle, buy a Michael Moore screed at Barnes & Noble, or order up a political movie from video on demand, remember that it is the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United that guarantees you the right to do so.
Bradley A. Smith, “Newsflash: First Amendment Upheld,” Wall Street Journal.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson (1813).
The intelligent man, when he pays taxes, certainly does not believe that he is making a prudent and productive investment of his money; on the contrary, he feels that he is being mulcted in an excessive amount for services that, in the main, are useless to him, and that, in substantial part, are downright inimical to him.
H. L. Mencken, in A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949).
Under Socialism the efficient man would have a price upon his head.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
Thomas Jefferson, First Innaugural Address, March 4, 1801.
This is the nature of human energy; individuals generate it, and control it. Each person is self-controlling, and therefore responsible for his acts. Every human being, by his nature, is free.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).
[T]he average workingman has before him two practicable methods for satisfying his will to power. By the first method he enters into a conspiracy with other workingmen . . . endeavor[ing] to raise the market value of their skill without offering any corresponding improvement in its quality. By the second method, the individual workman seeks so to improve his own skill that it shall bring more than the average price.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).
When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).
Progress . . . is to be measured by the accuracy of man’s knowledge of nature’s forces. If you examine this sentence carefully you will observe that I conceive progress as a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets ahead, in other words, by discarding the theory of to-day for the fact of to-morrow.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).
I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does not control me. It can not even make me read Spengler, if I’d rather read a pulp magazine.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).