account_balance Government
The role and nature of government
format_quote Quotes
"The State, let us never forget, has no resources of its own. It has nothing, it possesses nothing that it does not take from the workers."
menu_book Property and Law
View Full Quote"Public choice theory has been the avenue through which a romantic and illusory set of notions about the workings of governments and the behavior of persons who govern has been replaced by a set of notions that embody more skepticism about what governments can do and what governors will do, notions that are surely more consistent with the political reality that we may all observe about us."
menu_book The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty
View Full Quote"A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."
menu_book Reflections on the Revolution in France
View Full Quote"Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue. Pity, benevolence, friendship, are things almost unknown in high stations."
menu_book A Vindication of Natural Society
View Full Quote"The basic principle and the ultimate results of all statist doctrines are the same: dictatorship and destruction. The rest is only a matter of time."
menu_book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
View Full Quote"We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.'"
menu_book Anatomy of the State
View Full Quote"Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
menu_book Democracy in America
View Full Quote"A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."
menu_book Politics as a Vocation
View Full Quoteauto_stories Books
A Vindication of Natural Society
Burke's first published work, an anonymous satire of Lord Bolingbroke's style that pushes rationalist arguments against organized religion to their...
Read MoreCapitalism: The Unknown Ideal
A collection of essays by Rand, Alan Greenspan, Nathaniel Branden and Robert Hessen arguing that laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system...
Read MoreThe Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty
Volume 1 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, gathering his key essays, including "Politics without Romance," his 1979 lecture explaining P...
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