A Quote by Leonard Read

I would have government defend the life and property of all citizens equally; protect all willing exchange; suppress and penalize all fraud, all misrepresentation, all violence, all predatory practices; invoke a common justice under law; and keep the records incidental to these functions. Even this is a bigger assignment than governments, generally, have proven capable of. Let governments do these things and do them well. Leave all else to men in free and creative effort.

Leonard Read

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Assignment Bigger Capable Citizens Common Creative Defend Effort Else Equally Even Exchange Fraud Free Functions Generally Government Governments Invoke Justice Keep Law Leave Life Men Misrepresentation Practices Predatory Property Protect Proven Records Suppress Than Them Things Violence Well Willing Would

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Leonard Read
September 26, 1898 - May 14, 1983

Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them, and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But if men be bad, let the government be never so good, they will endeavour to warp and spoil it to their turn.

William Penn

The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.

Ayn Rand

A government which can protect and defend its citizens from wrong and outrage and does not is vicious. A government which would do it and cannot is weak; and where human life is insecure through either weakness or viciousness in the administration of law, there must be a lack of justice and where this is wanting, nothing can make up the deficiency.

Frances Harper

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

Noam Chomsky

We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property.

Susan B. Anthony

There is something that governments care for more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy.... Those of you who can break windows--break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to make the Government realize that property is as greatly endangered by women's suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old--do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion!

Emmeline Pankhurst

The government's only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud ... to protect men from foreign invaders ... to settle disputes among men according to objective laws ... The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly.

Ayn Rand

An individual citizen cannot protect himself from the powers of large corporations or external governments. It is the responsibility of the government to protect its citizens.

Wangari Maathai

That wise Men have in all Ages thought Government necessary for the Good of Mankind; and, that wise Governments have always thought Religion necessary for the well ordering and well-being of Society, and accordingly have been ever careful to encourage and protect the Ministers of it, paying them the highest publick Honours, that their Doctrines might thereby meet with the greater Respect among the common People.

Benjamin Franklin

And as a matter of fact, governments don't act, governments only react. The bankers make the decisions, and then governments decide how are we going to adjust to this. Government can't do anything unless the bank gives them the money to do it.

Robert Anton Wilson

As a general rule, governments are unlimited in their powers. All free governments, perhaps all other governments, are entitled in some shape or other to make laws and to repeal or amend them.

Samuel Freeman Miller

The government now requisitions the publics' telephone records and sifts through its emails. It labels whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden as traitors, even though they have exposed the corruption, lawlessness and host of antidemocratic practices engaged in by established governments. Police can take DNA samples of all people arrested of a crime, whether they are proven guilty or not. The United States is incarcerating people in record numbers, imprisoning over 2.3 million inmates while 6 million people at any one time [are] under carceral supervision - more than were in Stalin's Gulag.

Henry Giroux

The civil forfeiture law - if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law - is an incentive for perverse behavior: Predatory government agencies get to pocket the proceeds from property they seize from Americans without even charging them with, let alone convicting them of, crimes. Criminals are treated better than this because they lose the fruits of their criminality only after being convicted.

George Will

Despotic governments do not recognize the precious human component of the state, seeing its citizens only as a faceless, mindless -- and helpless -- mass to be manipulated at will. It is as though people were incidental to a nation rather than its very life-blood.

Aung San Suu Kyi

Bosses are no more inevitable in state and local governments than dictators are in national governments. They will arise and prosper, nevertheless, if true believers of democracy - citizens devoted to the democratic ideals - do not constantly oppose them.

Charles Edison

A famous, very often quoted phrase says: "That government is best, which governs least." I do not believe this to be a correct description of of the functions of a good government. Government ought to do all the things for which it is needed and for which it is established. Government ought to protect the individuals within the country against the violent and fraudulent attacks of gangsters, and it should defend the country against foreign enemies. These are the functions of government within a free system, within the system of the market economy.

Ludwig von Mises

A Quote by Leonard Read

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