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Individual freedom is precious and rare. It is constantly threatened by concentrated power, ignorance, collectivism, contempt for rights and property, and other evils. Securing and keeping freedom is a continuous, historic struggle.
That’s why all of us who cherish it must never cease to speak and act on freedom’s behalf. From time to time with that in mind, I’ll offer readers of this column a selection of especially valuable and poignant quotes on the subject. Here’s the latest installment:
“So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men” — French philosopher, historian and Enlightenment activist, François-Marie Arouet, whose nom de plume was Voltaire.
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“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.” — English chemist and novelist C. P. Snow.
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“There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure…. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state” — Isabel Paterson in The God of the Machine (1943).
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“Increasingly, inexorably, the State the Socialists have created is becoming more random in the economic and social justice it seeks to dispense, more suffocating in its effect on human aspirations and initiative, more politically selective in its defense of the rights of its citizens, more gargantuan in its appetite—and more disastrously incompetent in its performance. Above all, it poses a growing threat, however unintentional, to the freedom of this country, for there is no freedom where the State totally controls the economy. Personal freedom and economic freedom are indivisible. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t lose one without losing the other” — Margaret Thatcher in her March 20, 1976 speech, The Historic Choice.
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“It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought” — British author and intellectual Roger Scruton in Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006).
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Hilarious, brilliant, incisive. That describes the late Stefan Kisielewski (1911-1991), the prominent Polish intellectual. He was a constant thorn in the side of the communists and socialists because he had the courage to speak truth to power. I interviewed him in 1986 in Warsaw, when he told me that he had once been arrested and jailed for simply declaring that “Socialism is stupidism,” which only proved his point. On another occasion, he famously said, tongue-in-cheek, “Socialism heroically overcomes difficulties unknown in any other system.” In 1981, to make the point that the bad economic times in socialist Poland were the product of the system itself, he said, “It’s not a crisis, it’s a result.”
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“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).
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“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).
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“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?” — French economist and statesman Frederic Bastiat in his classic, The Law, available free at FEE.org.
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“What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable life for them, and with this as the foremost object ideas of freedom and self-reliance and service to the community were obscured to the point of disappearing. Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative business, possessed of great wealth, in which all citizens had a right to share… Athens had reached the point of rejecting independence, and the freedom she now wanted was freedom from responsibility. There could be only one result… If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms” — educator and classicist Edith Hamilton in Chapter 2 (“Athens’ Failure”) of The Echo of Greece (1957).
Lawrence writes a weekly op-ed for El American. He is President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Atlanta, Georgia; and is the author of “Real heroes: inspiring true stories of courage, character, and conviction“ and the best-seller “Was Jesus a Socialist?“ //
Lawrence escribe un artículo de opinión semanal para El American. Es presidente emérito de la Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) en Atlanta, Georgia; y es el autor de “Héroes reales: inspirando historias reales de coraje, carácter y convicción” y el best-seller “¿Fue Jesús un socialista?”