Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
— Barry Goldwater
First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.
— Martin Niemoeller, From the Kirchenverwaltung der Evangelischen Kirche in Hessen and Darmstadt
All that is essential for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
— Edmund Burke
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
— Edmund Burke
If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable
— John F. Kennedy
The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.
— Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
This country belongs to the people and whenever they shall grow weary of their government they can exercise their constitutional right to amend it, or revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.
— Abraham Lincoln
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.
— Thomas Jefferson
As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
— Henry David Thoreau
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.
— Frederick Douglass
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
— T.S.Elliot
The hottest seats in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crises, choose to do nothing.
— Dante Alighieri
Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
— Thomas Carlyle
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
— Elie Wiesel
The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people
— Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Men are failures not because they are stupid but because they are not sufficiently impassioned
— Struthers Burt
You may think your actions are meaningless and that they won’t help, but that is no excuse, you must still act.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
— Thomas Huxley
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any reason but because they are not already common.
— John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 1690
In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it cost nothing to be a patriot.
— Mark Twain, Notebook, 1904
I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error.
— James Garfield
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent … the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
— Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Olmstead vs. United States, United States Supreme Court (1928)
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
— Bertrand Russell
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world: indeed it’s the only thing that ever has!
— Margaret Meade
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … And what country can preserve its liberties, if it’s rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stephens Smith, quoted in Padover’s Jefferson On Democracy
Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success and more dangerous to carry through, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has against him those who benefited from the old system; while those who should benefit from the new are only lukewarm friends, being suspicious, as men generally are, of something new and not yet experienced. In speaking of innovations, it is first necessary to establish whether the innovators depend upon the strength of others or their own…in the first case, things always go badly for them, in the second, they almost always succeed. From this comes the fact that all armed prophets were victorious and the unarmed came to ruin.
— Nicolo Machiavelli
We are descended in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels — men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine.
— Dwight David Eisenhower
Let them call me a rebel and I welcome it; I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of demons should I make a whore of my soul.
— Thomas Paine
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
— Abraham Lincoln
It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
— Robert Jackson, United States Supreme Court Decision: American Communications Association v. Douds
Attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell.
— Karl Popper
The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism…. It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn.
— George Washington
If one does not carefully trace the problems back to their roots in a previous intervention, it is very easy to believe that yet another intervention is just the ticket for rectifying them.
— Gene Callahan
The chief cause of problems is solutions.
— Eric Sevareid
Those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
— J.K. Rowling
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
— Robert F. Kennedy
One determined person can make a significant difference; a small group of determined people can change the course of history
— Sonia Johnson
My country is the world. My religion is to do good.
— Thomas Paine
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.
— Thomas Jefferson
An individual, thinking himself injured, makes more noise than a State.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1785
The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.
— John Adams, February 13, 1818
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed.
— Thomas Jefferson
The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest painis the pain of a new idea.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession —their ignorance.
— Hendrick van Loon
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.
— Dr. Samuel Johnson
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.
— Ayn Rand
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
— Edmund Burke
You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
— Henrik Ibsen
One man can completely change the character of a country, and the industry of its people, by dropping a single seed in fertile soil.
— John C. Gifford
If this be treason, make the most of it!
— Patrick Henry
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 1
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 and will receive praise or blame for them.
— Friedrich Hayek
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
— Adlai Stevenson
Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
— Barry Goldwater
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty – power is ever stealing from the many to the few.
— Wendell Phillips, Speech to the Massachusetts Antislavery Soceity in 1852
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years
— Bertrand Russell
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously
— Hubert H. Humphrey
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.
— Thomas Paine
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as they are injurious to others.
— Thomas Jefferson
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
— James Madison, In a speech at the Virginia Convention, 1788
Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it.
— Woodrow Wilson
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
— Harry Emerson Fosdick
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.
— Edmund Burke
It is seldom that liberty of any kinds is lost all at once.
— David Hume
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
— Elie Wiesel
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him. …the idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights.
— Thomas Jefferson
Force, violence, pressure or compulsion with a view to conformity, are both uncivilized and undemocratic.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
— Edmund Burke
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.
— James Baldwin
Put no constrictions on the people. Leave ‘em ta Hell alone.
— Jimmie Durante
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.
— Abraham
All government, of course, is against liberty.
— H. L. Mencken
It is asserted by the most respectable writers upon government, that a well regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people. Tyrants have never placed any confidence on a militia composed of freemen.
— John Dewitt
The history of Liberty is a history of the limitations of governmental power not the increase of it.
— Woodrow Wilson
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo… The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom — the freedom we prize — is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.
— George W. Bush
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
— Benjamin Franklin
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
— William Pitt, To the House of Commons, November 18, 1783
The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals… It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.
— Albert Gallatin
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.
— Patrick Henry
I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
— H. L. Mencken
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
— Thomas Jefferson
What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.
— Thomas Sowell
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
— C.S. Lewis
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
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
— Thomas Jefferson
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
— George Orwell
I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says.
— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black
A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.
— Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
— Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
— P.J. O’Rourke
We love peace, but not peace at any price. There is a peace more destructive of the manhood of living man, than war is destructive to his body. Chains are worse than bayonets.
— Douglas Jerrold
You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can be free only if I am free.
— Clarence Darrow
Let every nation know…whether it wishes us well or ill… that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.
— John F. Kennedy
We can foresee a time when . . . the only people at liberty will be prison guards who will then have to lock up one another.
— Albert Camus
Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanisms what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don’t do the same for ‘Time’ magazine?
— Mark Fowler
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
— Albert Einstein
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or to impede their efforts to obtain it.
— John Stuart Mill
One does not encourage “responsibility” by forcibly restricting the range of people’s authority over their own lives.
— Butler Shaffer
The policy of the American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits.
— Thomas Jefferson
If we consider that each person owns his own body and can acquire ownership of other things by creating them, or by having ownership transferred to him by another owner, it becomes at least formally possible to define “being left alone” and its opposite, “being coerced”. Someone who forcibly prevents me from using my property as I want, when I am not using it to violate his right to use his property, is coercing me. A man who prevents me from taking heroin coerces me; a man who prevents me from shooting him does not.
— David Friedman
The individual can never escape the moral burden of his existence. He must choose between obedience to authority and responsibility to himself. Moral decisions are often hard and painful to make. The temptation to delegate this burden to others is therefore ever-present. Yet, as all of history teaches us, those who would take from man his moral burdens–be they priests or warlords, politicians or psychiatrists–must also take from him his liberty and hence his very humanity.
— Thomas S. Szasz
The individual can never escape the moral burden of his existence. He must choose between obedience to authority and responsibility to himself. Moral decisions are often hard and painful to make. The temptation to delegate this burden to others is therefore ever-present. Yet, as all of history teaches us, those who would take from man his moral burdens–be they priests or warlords, politicians or psychiatrists–must also take from him his liberty and hence his very humanity.
— Thomas S. Szasz
The right to be left alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.
— Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.
— Friedrich Hayek
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.
— John Adams
The dilemma … is between the democratic process of the market in which every individual has his share and the exclusive rule of a dictatorial body. Whatever people do in the market economy is the execution of their own plans. In this sense every human action means planning. What those calling themselves planners advocate is not the substitution of planned action for letting things go. It is the substitution of the planner’s own plan for the plans of his fellowmen. The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.
— Ludwig von Mises
I hate people who are intolerant.
— Dr. Laurence J. Peter
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
— Albert Einstein
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
— Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
Why doesn’t everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?
— Jimmy Durante
No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.
— Helen Keller
We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.
— William F. Buckley, Jr.
If we’ve learned anything in the past quarter century, it is that we cannot federalize virtue.
— George H.W. Bush, 1991
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
— William James
Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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.
— Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801
A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
— Robert Frost
Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.
— Archibald Macleish
Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have.
— Daniel Webster, 1847
In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.
— James Madison
Do what’s right for you, as long as it don’t hurt no one.
— Elvis Presley
Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
— William Allen White
All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.
— William F. Buckley, Jr.
Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another’s beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them.
— Joshua Liebman
If we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.
— John F. Kennedy
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought— not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
— Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes
Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
— Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse to rest on inference.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison December 20, 1787
It’s easy for people to assume that the Bill of Rights will be, as somebody once called the Constitution, a machine that runs itself. I disagree. I think eternal vigilance is the price of keeping it in working order.
— Judge Lawrence Tribe
[The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it’s also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government.
— Judge Lawrence Tribe
Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.
— William Howard Taft
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
— Walter Lippman
Freedom and the power to choose should not be the privilege of wealth. They are the birthright of every American.
— George Bush
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed.
— Thomas Jefferson
It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.
— Murray Rothbard
A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society.
— Walter Lippman
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.
— Thomas Jefferson
The real freedom of any individual can always be measured by the amount of responsibility which he must assume for his own welfare and security.
— Robert Welch
Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1801
Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will turn vegetarian.
— Heywood Brown
Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”
— Abraham Lincoln, Speech to the Illinois House of Representatives; 18 Dec. 1840
After 20 years on the bench I have concluded that federal drug laws are a disaster. It is time to get the government out of drug enforcement.
— Judge Whitman Knapp, New York Times; May 14, 1993
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
— Thomas Jefferson
It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
— Justice Louis D. Brandeis
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
— Rebecca West
Whenever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.
— Heinrich Heine
I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.
— Thomas Jefferson
A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no rights or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different.
— Chief Justice Warren E. Burger
To save a man’s life against his will is the same as killing him.
— Horace
So long as a man rides his hobbyhorse peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him —pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?
— Laurence Stern, 1759
It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1779
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
— H. L. Mencken
There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
— Thomas Jefferson
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.
— Thomas Paine, 1795
To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom.
— Thomas Jefferson, June 18, 1799
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
— Samuel Adams
If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism…The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.
— Ronald Reagan, Interview with Reason magazine, 1975
The Constitution is an instrument, above all, for limiting the functions of government… Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man’s liberty. Government represents power in the hands of some men to control and regulate the lives of other men.
— Barry Goldwater
One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can’t tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, but a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism.
— David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer
True capitalism is based upon one simple principle: that all exchanges of property are made with the voluntary consent of all parties. Private ownership of property and competition — the other two components of capitalism in most traditional definitions — are actually results of this foundational principle. As all governments are institutions of coercion, there is no way for them to acquire property through voluntary exchange. Further, with all exchanges being voluntary, sellers must by definition compete with one another in order to sell their products. So, the foundation of “capitalism” is really the non-aggression principle applied to property. Capitalism requires that no one’s property can be taken from them without their consent.
— Tom Mullen
