Top 34 Quotes & Sayings by Frank Chodorov

There cannot be a "good" society until there are "good" men.

Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by its avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus, in pulling Society down it pulls itself down. Its ultimate collapse is usually occasioned by a disastrous war, but preceding that event is a history of increasing and discouraging levies on the marketplace, causing a decline in the aspirations, hopes, and self-esteem of its victims.

If for no other reason, personal pride should prompt every governor and state legislator to take a secessionist attitude; they were not elected to be lackeys of the federal bureaucracy.

There cannot be a good tax nor a just one; every tax rests its case on compulsion.

Society thrives on trade simply because trade makes specialization possible, and specialization increases output, and increased output reduces the cost in toil for the satisfactions men live by. That being so, the market place is a most humane institution.

In America it is the so-called capitalist who is to blame for the fulfillment of Marx's prophecies. Beguiled by the state's siren song of special privilege, the capitalists have abandoned capitalism.

Posterity does not pay off anything of the national debt. Each administration adds to the debt left to it, and the promise of liquidation implied in every bond issue is a false promise.

We have retained the forms and phrases of a republic, but in reality we are living under an oligarchy, not of courtesan, but of bureaucrats.

Economics is not politics. One is a science, concerned with the immutable and constant laws of nature that determine the production and distribution of wealth; the other is the art of ruling.

Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery.

The institution of taxation rests foursquare on the axiom that somebody must rule somebody else.

The only beneficiaries of income taxation are the politicians, for it not only gives them the means by which they can increase their emoluments, but it also enables them to improve their importance. The have-nots who support the politicians in the demand for income taxation do so only because they hate the haves; . . . the sum of all the arguments for income taxation comes to political ambition and the sin of covetousness.

Income and inheritance taxes imply the denial of private property, and in that are different in principle from all other taxes. The government says to the citizen: “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.

Increasing the power of the state in response to the Soviet menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but bring it to the United States.

The 16th Amendment corroded the American concept of natural rights; ultimately reduced the American citizen to a status of subject, so much so that he is not aware of it; enhanced Executive power to the point of reducing Congress to innocuity; and enabled the central government to bribe the states, once independent units, into subservience. No kingship in the history of the world ever exercised more power than our Presidency, or had more of the people's wealth at its disposal.

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

Just what part does the State play in production to warrant its rake-off? The State does not give; it merely takes.

Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers.

The early American knew that freedom was nothing more than the absence of external restraint on behavior; the government could not give you freedom, it could only take it away.

Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids.

We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government's power to tax. No tinkering with this, that, or the other law will stop the trend toward socialism. We must repeal the Sixteenth Amendment.

Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man - in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.

At first it was the incomes of corporations, then of rich citizens, then of well-provided widows and opulent workers, and finally the wealth of housemaids and the tips of waitresses. This is all in line with the ability to pay doctrine. The poor, simply because there are more of them, have more ability to pay than the rich.

The pertinent question: if Americans did not want these wars should they have been compelled to fight them?

When the individual is relieved of the obligation of self-respect, he acquires the habits of helplessness; he is inclined to retreat to the security of the prenatal state. The more he is taken care of the more he wants care.

The State is not, as many political scientists would make it, an inanimate thing; it consists of people, human beings, each of whom operates under an inner compulsion to get the most out of life with the least expenditure of labor.

Taxation is nothing but organized robbery, and there the subject should be dropped.

We have but to remember man's natural tendency to satisfy his desires with the minimum of effort to realize how political power will be utilized.

The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as 'free education' is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control.

[When people] say 'let's do something about it,' they mean 'let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.' And that somebody is invariably you.

We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government's power to tax.

The freedoms won by Americans in 1776 were lost in the revolution of 1913.

The corruption of freedom is in proportion to the moral deterioration of the people. For a people who have lost their sense of self-respect have no need for freedom. And the income tax, by transferring the property of earners to the State, has disintegrated the moral fiber of Americans to such a degree that they do not even recognize the fact.

The State acquires power... and because of its insatiable lust for power it is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates.