When laws are carried out not only for the public good, but also to target and punish, it dos society great harm.
The more numerous the laws,
the more corrupt the government.
— Publius Tacitus, Annals (117 AD)
(Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges)
Gerald Ford's famous paraphrasing of Nock's statement: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."Address to Congress (08-12-74)
You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it;
and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.
— Albert Jay Nock, The Criminality of the State (1939)
(note that the famous version is often misattributed to Jefferson, Goldwater, or Reagan, but is actually from Gerald Ford)
The government that seems the most unwise, Oft goodness to the people best supplies; That which is meddling, touching everything, Will work but ill, and disappointment bring.
Act for the people’s benefit. Trust them; leave them alone.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (The Way to Power) (500 BC)
Click to view the actual quote, in President Jefferson's own handwriting.
Still one thing more, fellow-citizens–a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
— Thomas Jefferson‘s First Inaugural Address (1801)
I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.
Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?
There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)
Brigadier General Daniel Morgan, inspiration for the move The Patriot, was the best tactician of the Revolution...and opposed to preemptive war
As to war, I am and always was a great enemy, at the same time a warrior the greater part of my life, and were I young again, should still be a warrior while ever this country should be invaded and I lived — a Defensive war I think a righteous war to Defend my life & property & that of my family, in my own opinion, is right & justifiable in the sight of God.
An offensive war, I believe to be wrong and would therefore have nothing to do with it, having no right to meddle with another man’s property, his ox or his ass, his man servant or his maid servant or anything this is his. Neither does he have a right to meddle with anything that is mine, if he does I have a right to defend it by force.
— Brigadier General Daniel Morgan of the American Revolutionary War, letter to Miles Etting (1798)
Government programs are driven by greed, not altruism.
It is the selfish who demand that politicians take money from others, and redistribute it to themselves.
— KAZ Vorpal, But Now You Know (2011)
Any time you see a talking head advocating "national interest" above what is right and good, remember this saying
The man of character cares about what is right,
the inferior man cares about his advantage.
— K’ung-fu-tzu, according to the Analects, 4.16 (225 BC)
Early to bed and early to rise is a bad rule for anyone who wishes to become acquainted with our most prominent and influential people.
— George Ade, True Bills (1904)
Each of the last five American presidents, treating the evil Egyptian dictator like a friend, thereby helping isolate America in the eyes of the world
It is not we non-interventionists who are isolationsists.
The real isolationists are those who impose sanctions and embargoes on countries and peoples across the globe because they disagree with the internal and foreign policies of their leaders.
The real isolationists are those who choose to use force overseas to promote democracy, rather than seek change through diplomacy, engagement, and by setting a positive example.
—Ron Paul, I advocate the same foreign policy the Founding Fathers would, Union Leader (2007)
There is a recent push to censor political speech like the above picture, ban guns, et cetera, to "protect politicians"...but crazed maniacs aside, their fear is healthy for liberty
Where the people fear the government you have tyranny.
Where the government fears the people you have liberty.
— John Basil Barnhill, Indictment of Socialism (#3), transcript of Barnhill-Tichenor Debate on Socialism (1914)
The Arizona shooting is just the latest in an endless series of efforts by corrupt political thugs to exploit crisis and tragedy
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
— Rahm Emanuel, Interview to the Wall Street Journal, (2008)
A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper.
He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.
— Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, the Limits of Government Activity
Makework "stimulus" jobs are welfare, not employment
A private job pays for itself and more, a form of wealth creation that is self-sustaining;
But a government job only sucks at taxes, burdening the economy, until the money runs out.
The hundreds of billions wasted on foreign aid go straight into the pockets of the tyrants
That’s where all the foreign aid (which might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries) went as well.
The U.S. government still squanders about $20 billion a year this way, and European governments spend proportionally even more; it’s all gone straight down a giant rathole.
— Douglas Casey, Opportunity in Mozambique
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country — it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today — it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect
— George Orwell, Freedom of the Press (1948)
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force!
Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
— Cited by Upton Sinclair, in The Cry for Justice (1915), as having been said by George Washington
It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease.
Financial markets are the machines in which much of human welfare is decided; yet we know more about how our car engines work than about how our global financial system functions. We lurch from crisis to crisis. In a networked world, mayhem in one market spreads instantaneously to all others—and we have only the vaguest of notions how this happens, or how to regulate it.
So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but to shamans. We place control of the world’s largest economy in the hands of a few elderly men, the central bankers.
— Benoît Mandelbrot, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004)
Mandelbrot was also a brilliant mathematician, the father of Fractal Geometry
Our constitution protects aliens, drunks, and U. S. Senators. There ought to be one day (just one) when there is open season on senators.
— Will Rogers, Autobiography
Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food.
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-1785)
Temperate, sincere, and intelligent inquiry and discussion are only to be dreaded by the advocates of error. The truth need not fear them…
— Dr. Benjamin Rush, Signer of the Declaration of Independence, Provisions of the Last Will and Testament of Dr. James Rush
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
– Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did not wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility.
All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
— Lord John Dalberg Acton, Letter to Mandell Creighton (1887)
Common Sense, the book advocating secession from the British empire and credited with starting the Revolution, was the top-selling book of the 18th century, globally.
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
— Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Hence the less government we have the better–the fewer laws and the less confided power.
The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man; of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Politics (1844)
The end of Law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge Freedom.
— John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689)
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency.
Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded.
Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
– General Douglas MacArthur, A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (1965)
I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe–‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. —Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul.
– George Bernard Shaw, Everybody’s Political What’s What (1944)
The US Code, only a subset of all laws and regulations on the books today. The US imprisons a higher percentage of its populace than Communist China does, more than Iran, more than did the Soviet Union, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or the Taliban's Afghanistan.
America needs fewer laws, not more prisons.
By trying to seize far more power than is necessary over American citizens, the federal government is destroying its own legitimacy.
We face a choice not of anarchy or authoritarianism, but a choice of limited government or unlimited government.
– James Bovard, Lost Rights; The Destruction of American Liberty
In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the “collective” right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of “the people” to keep and bear arms…The phrase “the people” meant the same thing in the Second Amendment as it did in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments — that is, each and every free person.
A select militia defined as only the privileged class entitled to keep and bear arms was considered an anathema to a free society, in the same way that Americans denounced select spokesmen approved by the government as the only class entitled to the freedom of the press.
If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the 18th century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis.
– Stephen P. Holbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right
Because the first two amendments of the Bill of Rights were not ratified, the right to keep and bear arms was actually number four in the original document
The government that seems the most unwise,
Oft goodness to the people best supplies;
That which is meddling, touching everything,
Will work but ill, and disappointment bring.
– Tao Te Ching
But Now You Know
Words of the Sentient 
