Throughout history, the right to pursue one's goals in a peaceable, voluntary manner, without direction, control, and coercion, has won a hostile reception. There's little older in history than the idea that some should give orders and others obey.
Walter E. Williams
People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What's more, they believe they've been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others.
Walter E. Williams
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
H. L. Mencken
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
James Madison
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would 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 own conscience.
Clive Staples Lewis
The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
Plato
Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always.
Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi
All history is one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others.
William Graham Sumner
I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson
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.
H. L. Mencken
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