Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809)

"Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil." Thomas Paine

Henry Hazlitt (1894 - 1993)

The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.
Henry Hazlitt

The Vast Libertarian Conspiracy

Praxeology - Episode 8 - Time

John Murray (1741 - 1815)

"To say to the slave who has not been emancipated 'Do not behave as a slave' is to mock his enslavement. But to say the same to the slave who has been set free is the necessary appeal to put into effect the privileges and rights of his liberation."
— John Murray

William Ewart Gladstone (1809 - 1898)

There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of individual character; and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large. William Gladstone

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (1881 - 1973)

A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police. Ludwig von Mises

Friedrich August Hayek (1899 - 1992)

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.
o The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 76

Bill Richardson

Ignorance has always been the weapon of tyrants; enlightenment the salvation of the free.
Bill Richardson

Praxeology - Episode 7 - Scale of Values