And now that the legislators and do gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems on society, may they finally end where they should have begun. May they reject all systems and try liberty...
- Frederick Bastiat
It is in the interest of the wage-earner to have many other alternatives open to him than service under one all-powerful employer called the State.
- Sir Winston Churchill 1946
A spontaneous economic order is more efficient than an imposed order…..A spontaneous order is inconceivable without personal freedom and, in particular, without freedom of choice.
- Lord Coleraine
The mischievous idea that all public needs should be satisfied by compulsory organization and that all the means that individuals are willing to devote to pubic purposes should be under the control of government, is wholly alien to the basic principles of a free society.
- Friedrich Hayek
- The Wealth of Nations
Lift the curtain and 'the State' reveals itself as a little group of fallible men in Whitehall, making guesses about the future, influenced by political prejudices and partisan prejudices, and working on projections drawn from the past by a staff of economists.
- Enoch Powell
It is no accident that wherever the State ha taken economic decision away from the citizen, it has deprived him of his other liberties as well.
- Enoch Powell
The man of system is apt to be very wise in his own conceit. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board; he does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have not another principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, although different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
- Adam Smith (1759)
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (1759; New York: A. M. Kelley, 1966).
The predominant teachings of this age are that there are no limits to man's capacity to govern others and that, therefore, no limitations ought to be imposed upon government. The older faith, born of long ages of suffering under man's dominion over man, was that the exercise of unlimited power by men with limited minds and self-regarding prejudices is soon oppressive, reactionary, and corrupt. The older faith taught that the very condition of progress was the limitation of power to the capacity and the virtue of rulers. Men may have to pass through a terrible ordeal before they find again the central truths they have forgotten.
- Walter Lippmann
The Good Society, 1956), p. 38.
I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread.
- Thomas Jefferson
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