16 quotes
Socialism is founded on a lie -- the premise that man knows more than he in fact does know.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
Communism, socialism, the welfare state, et cetera, are essentially one and the same thing.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
Civilization, I sometimes think, is little more than a thin veneer of culture covering a host of red-assed baboons!
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
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.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
I have never met a single European who had a clean, clear-cut understanding of the principles of strictly limited government.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
Self-promotion is self-defeating. No matter how brilliant an individual, one becomes instinctively "leery" when he toots his own horn.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
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.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
'What would you cut out of government expenditures?' I cannot answer that question. Ask me what I would leave in.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
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.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
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.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
Clever phrases or cliches such as "Human rights are above property rights" or "What would you do, let them starve?" have influenced untold numbers of Americans to vote for charlatans and to advocate legal thievery.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
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.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
Government can no more use coercion against the life or property of a person and, at the same time, perform its proper function of defending the life or property of that person than I can practice Christian charity on another while robbing him.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
Freedom is the key to Godliness
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
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
the persons who compose it will be in as perfect a state as it is possible for it or them to be at any given time.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)
Why do tourists gape so eagerly at this sort of thing [Château de Fontainebleau]? Most people, I believe, aspire to what these agents and sycophants of the state achieved: ease without work, services for themselves by edict, power and position by wishing plus, of course, a little intrigue.
Leonard E. Read Journal (1949)