Clergyman's

If we are free to be our varietal selves; if there be no obstructions to the exchange of ideas and goods; if we have the liberty to move; society and
- Leonard E. Read

Government cannot, in logic and justice, possess any powers or rights that are not properly the powers and rights of any or all of the individuals who establish it.
- Leonard E. Read

All creative thought and creative action is strictly personal. A committee, any collective, cannot think. It cannot act creatively. It can only act destructively. It can exercise brute force.
- Leonard E. Read

At one end of the intellectual spectrum are the wise, those who know they don't know much; and on the other end are the egotists, those who have little, if any, awareness of how little they know.
- Leonard E. Read

Socialism depends upon and presupposes material achievements which socialism itself can never create. Socialism is operative only in wealth situations brought about by motes of production other than its own. Socialism takes and redistributes wealth, but it is utterly incapable of creating wealth.
- Leonard E. Read

Self-promotion is self-defeating. No matter how brilliant an individual, one becomes instinctively ""leery"" when he toots his own horn.
- Leonard E. Read

Self-promotion is self-defeating. No matter how brilliant an individual, one becomes instinctively ""leery"" when he toots his own horn.
- Leonard E. Read

Self-promotion is self-defeating. No matter how brilliant an individual, one becomes instinctively ""leery"" when he toots his own horn.
- Leonard E. Read

I have yet to find a person who does not agree with this: ""It is wrong for me to control you or for you to control me."" Then I say, ""It is wrong for two of us to control you."" Agreed. Then I say, It is wrong for 150 million of us to control you."" Agreed. But the BUT arises as soon as most persons begin to reason from the general to the particular. The penetration of the social cancer is so deep that they can no longer see how persons could be educated, or roads could be built, or the mails delivered, or prosperity made possible, short of coercion, the thing they admit to be evil.
- Leonard E. Read

I have yet to find a person who does not agree with this: ""It is wrong for me to control you or for you to control me."" Then I say, ""It is wrong for two of us to control you."" Agreed. Then I say, It is wrong for 150 million of us to control you."" Agreed. But the BUT arises as soon as most persons begin to reason from the general to the particular. The penetration of the social cancer is so deep that they can no longer see how persons could be educated, or roads could be built, or the mails delivered, or prosperity made possible, short of coercion, the thing they admit to be evil.
- Leonard E. Read