Leonard Read Quotes

Coercion doesn't change from evil to good if employed by two against one or by 200 million against one. Arithmetic has no bearing on moral principles.

Government cannot, in logic and justice, possess any powers or rights that are not properly the powers and rights of any or all of the individuals who establish it.

The proper function of government does not include government's intrusion into economic activities;..it should

It should be noted that people in the free market rarely bear false witness; integrity is the rule. The morning mile, phone calls, planes the airlines buy, autos by the millions - no one could list the instances - are as represented. We have daily, eloquent, enormous testimony that the Ten Commandments can be and are observed by fallible human beings. Contemporary politics is the most glaring of all exceptions.

Self-promotion is self-defeating. No matter how brilliant an individual, one becomes instinctively "leery" when he toots his own horn.

All creative thought and creative action is strictly personal. A committee, any collective, cannot think. It cannot act creatively. It can only act destructively. It can exercise brute force.

There is really nothing that can be done except by an individual. Only individuals can learn. Only individuals can think creatively. Only individuals can cooperate. Only individuals can combat statism.

Socialism is founded on a lie -- the premise that man knows more than he in fact does know.

Whenever government assumes responsibility for the security, welfare, and prosperity of citizens, the costs of government rise beyond the point where it is politically expedient to cover them by direct tax levies.

Civilization, I sometimes think, is little more than a thin veneer of culture covering a host of red-assed baboons!

I have yet to find a person who does not agree with this: "It is wrong for me to control you or for you to control me." Then I say, "It is wrong for two of us to control you." Agreed. Then I say, It is wrong for 150 million of us to control you." Agreed. But the BUT arises as soon as most persons begin to reason from the general to the particular. The penetration of the social cancer is so deep that they can no longer see how persons could be educated, or roads could be built, or the mails delivered, or prosperity made possible, short of coercion, the thing they admit to be evil.

At one end of the intellectual spectrum are the wise, those who know they don't know much; and on the other end are the egotists, those who have little, if any, awareness of how little they know.

Freedom is the key to Godliness

If we are free to be our varietal selves; if there be no obstructions to the exchange of ideas and goods; if we have the liberty to move; society and

An action is morally good which aids or promotes this unfolding of self and it is morally bad if it inhibits or destroys the process. It, of course, goes without saying that this does not include one's own rise at the expense of another.