“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.”

~Ronald Reagan (From Interview with Reason Magazine, 1975)

“Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security deserve neither.”

~Benjamin Franklin

“The sound of freedom is something you never hear until it is gone.”

~Unknown

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.”

~William Pitt

“No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.”

~Edmund A. Opitz

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”

~H.L. Mencken

“No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom “

~Ghandi

“A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.”

~Barry Goldwater

“That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.”

~Thomas Jefferson

“It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

~Voltaire

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”

~Thomas Jefferson

“A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.”

~P. J. O’Rourke

“Limiting freedom ‘just a little bit’ is in the same category with the classic example ‘a little bit pregnant’.”

~Robert Anson Heinlein

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.”

~Thomas Paine

“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”

~P.J. O’Rourke

“If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too.”

~Somerset Maugham