Quotes on Individual Liberty

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals - the technique of the marketplace.

While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty.

No system of regulation can safely be substituted for the operation of individual liberty as expressed in competition.

We need to get beyond the politics of the moment, the deficit of the hour, the military count of the day, the numbers that rarely shape events. Our long-term interests must be in people and in the values of democracy and individual liberty.

I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society.

Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

No one can be free unless he is independent. Therefore, the first active manifestations of the child's individual liberty must be so guided that through this activity he may arrive at independence.

Individual liberty depends upon keeping government under control.

The [U.S.] Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals ... it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government ... it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government.

Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation.

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

The State calls its own violence, law; but that of the individual, crime.

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.

Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.