timeline Freedom Timeline
The fight for liberty through history - authors, books, quotes about freedom
"Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principle known as the Rule of Law."
menu_book Law, Legislation and Liberty
Read Full Quote"Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power."
menu_book Capitalism and Freedom
Read Full Quote"The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy."
menu_book Capitalism and Freedom
Read Full Quote"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."
menu_book Capitalism and Freedom
Read Full Quotemenu_book Capitalism and Freedom
A seminal work arguing that economic freedom is a prerequisite for political freedom, exploring the role of capitalism in a free society
View Book"From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time."
menu_book The Constitution of Liberty
Read Full Quote"We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure."
menu_book The Open Society and Its Enemies
Read Full Quote"We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets."
menu_book The Open Society and Its Enemies
Read 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
Read Full Quote"Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."
menu_book Democracy in America
Read Full Quote"There is a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom."
menu_book Democracy in America
Read Full Quote"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference, while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
menu_book Democracy in America
Read Full Quote"Be resolved to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."
menu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
Read Full Quote"It is therefore the inhabitants of countries who allow themselves to be coerced who are unnatural, since freedom is their natural state; and their slavery is born of their own fault, not of any lack of courage, but rather of some scorn of their natural condition and some unaccountable failure of good sense."
menu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
Read Full Quotemenu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
Written around 1549 by the young French magistrate Étienne de La Boétie and first published posthumously in 1576, this founding text of libertarian political philosophy asks a single radical question:...
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