Favorite quotes

Everyone has quotes they're especially fond of. These are some of mine.

"It is scarcely possible to touch on any subject, that will not suggest an allusion to some corruption in governments." --Thomas Paine, Rights of Man notes #24

"Thus the sound-money principle has two aspects. It is affirmative in approving the market's choice of a commonly used medium of exchange. It is negative in obstructing the government's propensity to meddle with the currency system." -- Ludwig von Mises, Theory of Money and Credit, Ch. 21

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." -- Emma Goldman

"What all the enemies of the gold standard spurn as its main vice is precisely the same thing that in the eyes of the advocates of the gold standard is its main virtue, namely, its incompatibility with a policy of credit expansion."
Ludwig von Mises, Theory of Money and Credit

"Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism."
-- Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit

"The true remedy for most evils is none other than liberty, unlimited and complete liberty, liberty in every field of human endeavor."
Gustave de Molinari

"[T]he ills [ascribed] to liberty—or, to use an absolutely equivalent expression, to free competition—do not originate in liberty, but in monopoly and restriction." Gustave de Molinari

"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."
Thomas Paine, Forester Letter #3

"Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them . . . America will never be happy till she gets clear of foreign [interventions]. Wars, without ceasing, will break out till that period arrives." -- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis I

"To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not."
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

"A free and prosperous society has no fear of anyone entering it. But a welfare state is scared to death of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out." -- Harry Browne

"No country with really elaborate home theater has ever risen in revolt" -- Bill Bonner, Daily Reckoning, Jan. 21, 2004

"It is not because a part of the government is elective, that makes it less a despotism, if the persons so elected possess afterwards, as a parliament, unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism." -- Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part II.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

"'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. And 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer." -- Joseph Sobran

“Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose” -- Mary Shelley

"Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government." Thomas Paine, Rights of Man Part I

"The first condition of any monetary reform is to halt the printing presses." Ludwig von Mises, On the Manipulation of Money and Credit

"The people and the economy can only wax fat and prosperous when their government is starved and puny." - Murray Rothbard, "Repudiating the National Debt"