It is the responsibility of every citizen to ignore dumb laws.
— Ian Clarke - aka Sanity [http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=73217&cid=6588343]
Politics on the internet, it's like jupiter's great red spot, except made of feces.
— cutsDwnSudoIntelects [http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/8llur]
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
— Milton Friedman
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals
— Jerzy Peterkiewicz
The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
— Thomas Sowell
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them
— George Orwell
Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.
— Thomas Jefferson
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
as Isaac Asimov put it (wording approximate): "If I must be ruled by larcenous bullies, I much prefer that they be located far away. Local bullies know far more about me and my doings than faraway bullies sitting in offices in Washington, and can oppress me far more effectively."
— Henry Spencer [http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Htt7u5.E6n%40spsystems.net]
Socialism doesn't start with concentration camps .... Full employment is a threat, not a promise.
— Maht
I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintainence of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tenticles and get bad results elsewhere.
— Milton Friedman
The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.
— Milton Friedman
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
— Milton Friedman
21:55 [fgb] > ah, ok indymedia is a place where "zurdos" can be "zurdos" freely?
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
— (Jerry) Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy
Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.
— F.A. Hayek
Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.
— F.A. Hayek
There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.
— Margaret Thatcher
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
— John Adams, Journal 1772
All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree
— James Madison, speech at the Constitutional Convention, July 11, 1787.
All governments lie.
— journalist I.F. Stone, addressing journalism students on the one truth they'd be well-advised always to recall.
Freedom includes the right to say what others may object to and resent... The essence of citizenship is to be tolerant of strong and provocative words.
— John Diefenbaker
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice... moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.
— Karl Hess, as Barry Goldwater's head speechwriter
Liberty is the breath of progress.
— Robert Ingersoll
The United States is a nation of laws, poorly written and randomly enforced.
— Frank Zappa
Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.
— Publius Cornelius Tacitus
Probably all laws are useless; for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them.
— Demonax - (Roman philosopher, circa 150 A.D.)
The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
— Cornelius Tacitus, 55-117 AD, Roman historian
It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.
— Alexander Hamilton
The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.
— Lao Tsu
There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.
— Milton Friedman
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
— Alexis De Tocqueville
The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
— Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
— HL Mencken
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
— Mignon McLaughlin
The art of taking money from the few and votes from the many under the pretext of protecting the one from the other.
— Sen. Matthew Quay (R-PA), quoted in Realigning America: Mckinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 by R. Hal Williams.