Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
      Thomas Jefferson, to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819

Now what liberty can there be where property is taken without consent?
      Samuel Adams

...we are living in a sick society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them.
      William L. Comer

I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
      Milton Friedman, Nobel-prize-winning economist

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.
      Mahatma Ghandi

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that the act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.
      Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, 1802

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who protrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money - if a gun is held to his head.
      P.J. O'Rourke

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
      Benjamin Franklin

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
      John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty"

There is nothing more odious than a majority. It consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accomodating scoundrels and subservient weaklings, and a mass of men who trudge after them without in the least knowing their own minds.
      Goethe

Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
      Sentator Daniel Webster

Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.
      William Pitt

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors in sinful and tyrannical.
      Thomas Jefferson

If even one new drug of the stature of penicillin or digitalis has been unjustifiably banished to a company's back shelf because of exceedingly stringent regulatory requirements, that event will have harmed more people than all the toxicity that has occurred in the history of modern drug development.
      William Wardell