If government half a century ago had provided us with all our dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators today to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves.
From Auberon Herbert
You will not make a man wiser by taking freedom of action from him. A man can only learn when he is free to act.
The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation.
If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force.
The ruling idea of the politician - stated rather bluntly - is that those who are opposed to him exist for the purpose of being made to serve his ends, if he can get power enough in his hands to force these ends upon them.
Every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive.
How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?
We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do.
And what sort of philosophical doctrine is thi - that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others.
Do you not see, first, that - as a mental abstract - physical force is directly opposed to morality; and secondly, that it practically drives out of existence the moral forces?
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