President Herbert Hoover -

 When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned. There is no such thing as a no-man’s land between honesty and dishonesty. Our strength lies in spiritual concepts. It lies in public sensitiveness to evil. Our greatest danger is not from invasion by foreign armies. Our dangers are that we may commit suicide from within by complaisance with evil, or by public tolerance of scandalous behavior.

Bryan Caplan -

 But in a strange sense, both gun control and prohibition grow out of softness. A system with the moral courage to harshly, swiftly, and surely punish violence would have little need of gun control. A system with the moral courage to harshly, swiftly, and surely punish abusers for stealing, trespassing, vandalizing, and defiling would have little need of prohibition. In both cases, we haphazardly punish millions of innocents because we refuse to decisively punish thousands of clear-cut criminals.

Thomas Sowell -

 Most people who read the Communist Manifesto have no idea it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nonetheless spoke boldly in the name of the workers.

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 The best thing about being a “conspiracy theorist” is not having myocarditis.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -

 We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.

Aristotle -

 If you live under the same laws as your leaders, you are a citizen. If you live under different laws, you are a subject.

Simone de Beauvoir -

 The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.

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 Hard times make hard men

 hard men make soft times

soft times make soft men

soft men then make hard times.

Thomas Sowell -

 It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Alexander Trachtenberg (1944) -

When we get ready to take the United States, we will not take it under the label of communism, we will not take it under the label of socialism, these labels are unpleasant to the American people, and have been speared too much. We will take the United States under labels we have made very lovable; we will take it under liberalism, under progressivism, under democracy. But, take it, we will.

Elon Musk -

 If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny.

Friedrich Hayek -

 If democracies abandon the idea of freedom and happiness of the individual, they admit their civilization is not worth preserving.

Benito Mussolini -

People are tired of liberty. They have had a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer a chaste and austere virgin….Today’s youth are moved by other slogans…..Order, Hierarchy, Discipline.

Aristotle -

 It is a habit of tyrants never to like anyone who has a spirit of dignity and independence. The tyrant claims a monopoly of such qualities for himself; he feels that anybody who asserts a rival dignity, or acts with independence, is threatening his own superiority and the despotic power of his tyranny. He hates him accordingly as a subverter of his own authority.

It is also a habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens to that of citizens at table and in society; citizens, they feel, are enemies, but aliens will offer no opposition.

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 Sheep spend their entire lives afraid of the wolf only to be eaten by their shepherd.

Aldous Huxley -

 The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Edward Conze (1934) -

 Fascism is the organised attempt to introduce socialist planning with the consent of big business.

Richard Feynman -

 I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.

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 Liberty means not having to ask for permission.

Mark Twain -

 It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

 In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.