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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

[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.

It's sort of my go-to stock image of my childhood, actually. I think it has something to do with knowing I'll never be able to go back to that time that makes me cry every time I listen to it.

Rules too soft are seldomly followed; rules too harsh are seldomly executed.

Jealousy takes root in the soil of insecurity.

The logic is backwards. Genius is the result of doing what you love, not a prerequisite for it.

A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence.

In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.

the pain we suffer is a way to make us appreciate what comes next.

If we must fall, we should boldly meet our fate.

I'm very lucky, I'm happy with life because my experiences led me to do what I had to do. I don't have any regrets whatsoever.

Winning is often simply getting up off the ground one more time than your opponent.