The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
~ John Stuart Mill, 1869.

I have not yet begun to fight!
~ First Lieutenant John Paul Jones, 1779.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
~ Adam Smith, 1776.

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.
~ James Madison, 1787.

You can't kill me but once. Shoot, shoot- and be damned! I won't be tied!
~ Henry Harris, 1845.

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.
~ Frederick Douglass, 1857.

I was now getting, as I have said, one dollar and fifty cents per day. I contracted for it; I earned it; it was paid to me; it was rightfully my own; yet, upon each returning Saturday night, I was compelled to deliver every cent of that money to Master Hugh. And why? ... solely because he had the power to compel me to give it up. The right of the grim-visaged pirate upon the high seas is exactly the same.
~ Frederick Douglass, 1845.

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.
~ T.S. Eliot, 1949.

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835.

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835.

Do not give in to evil, but attack it all the more boldly.
~ Virgil, 19 BC.

Man has became all he is without knowing it.
~ Giambattista Vico, 1854.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
~ Frédéric Bastiat, 1848.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen... Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa.
~ Frédéric Bastiat, 1850.

I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.
~ F.A. Hayek, 1974.

We are only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based - a communications system which we call the market and which turns out to be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than any that man has deliberately designed.
~ F.A. Hayek, 1974.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
~ F.A. Hayek, 1988.

The encouragement of mere consumption is no benefit to commerce; for the difficulty lies in supplying the means, not in stimulating the desire of consumption...Thus, it is the aim of good government to stimulate production, of bad government to encourage consumption.
~ J.B. Say, 1803.

There is under capitalism one way to wealth: to serve the consumers better and cheaper than other people do.
~ Ludwig von Mises, 1956.

In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogans of "defense" and "emergency," it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace.
~ Murray Rothbard, 1974.

On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers.
~ Murray Rothbard, 1970.

Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.
~ Ludwig von Mises, 1949.

In some ways, liberty is the craziest and most implausible idea anyone ever dreamed up. And yet only liberty really accomplishes that seemingly elusive dream of a prosperous, orderly, and peaceful society in which every member is permitted to have a role in its development. It takes some imagination to understand how.
~ Jeffery Tucker, 2011.

Anarcho-Capitalist