“The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual’s own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it’s in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they’ll do you harm, why isn’t it all right to say you must not eat too much because you’ll do harm? Why isn’t it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you’re likely to die? Why isn’t it all right to say, ‘Oh, skiing, that’s no good, that’s a very dangerous sport, you’ll hurt yourself’? Where do you draw the line?” — economist Milton Friedman, author of Free to Choose, among many other works.

“Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible” — Janice Rogers Brown, former Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court.

“Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being, as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner. All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity” — The Last of the Mohicans author James Fenimore Cooper in "On Individuality" in The American Democrat (1838).

"Lord, the money we do spend on government! And it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago" -- humorist Will Rogers, from The Will Rogers Book (1972).

“The interventionists do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are. For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people” — Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in Socialism (1922).

“Believe it to be the greatest of all infamies, to prefer your existence to your honor, and for the sake of life to lose every inducement to live” — the ancient Roman poet Juvenal in Satires, VIII. 83.

"Learn as if you were to live forever; live as if you were to die tomorrow" -- superb advice from the late, great John Wooden, who died in June 2010 at age 99. He was the first person ever to be chosen for the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player (1961) and a coach (1973). He also wrote, “You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”

“You say that you are my judge. I do not know if you are! But I tell you that you must take good care not to judge me wrongly, because you will put yourself in great danger. I warn you, so that when God punishes you for it, I would have done my duty by telling you!” — Jehanne Darc’s warning to Bishop Cauchon (15 March 1431) before her execution by fire. She is best known today as Joan D’Arc, or Joan of Arc.

“Intellectual freedom is essential to human society—freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economy, and culture. But freedom of thought is under a triple threat in modern society—from the deliberate opium of mass culture, from cowardly, egotistic, and philistine ideologies, and from the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship. Therefore, freedom of thought requires the defense of all thinking and honest people” — Andrei Sakharov, Russian physicist, anti-Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate in Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968).

“Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books” — 16th Century French philosopher and judge, Étienne de La Boétie, in Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548).

"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life" — Henry David Thoreau, 19th Century American philosopher and author of Walden and Civil Disobedience.

"Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost" -- Thomas J. Watson, president of IBM (1952-1971) and U.S. Ambassador to the USSR (1979-1981). He also wrote, “If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.”

“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, 'a new form of servitude’" — Nobel laureate and Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek in Individualism and the Economic Order, University of Chicago Press (1948).

“How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin” — 40th U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

“Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle” — Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and many other books.

“The loser always has an excuse; the winner always has a program. The loser says it may be possible, but it’s difficult; the winner says it may be difficult, but it’s possible” — tennis champion and professional golfer Althea Gibson (see https://bit.ly/2J444eE).

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it” — economist Thomas Sowell in “The Survival of the Left,” Forbes magazine (Sept. 8, 1997).

“Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man….The sum of it all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people” — Samuel Adams, American patriot and organizer of the Boston Tea Party in an essay published in The Advertiser (1748).

“The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible” — former U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Vice President of the U.S. and 1968 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey in Guns magazine, February 1960. No kidding.

“In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as ‘we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology’. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion” — Nobel laureate and author of The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in St. Austin Review interview with Joseph Pearce, Sr., February 2003.