B

• Our business in life is not to get ahead of other people, but to get ahead of ourselves.

Burt Bacharach

• A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

Nathaniel Bacon

• The poverty of the country is such that all power and sway has got into the hands of the rich, who by extortions advantages, having the common people in their debt, have always curbed and oppressed them in all manner of ways.

Russell Baker

• A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.

Mikhael Bakunin

• It is necessary to abolish completely, in principle and in practice, everything which may be called political power. As long as political power exists there will always be rulers and ruled, masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.
• In a word, we object to all legislation, all authority, and all influence, privileged, official and legal, even when it has proceeded from universal suffrage, convinced that it must always turn to the profit of a dominating and exploiting minority, against the interests of the immense majority enslaved.
• Freedom is the absolute right of all adult men and women to seek permission for their actions from their own conscience and reason, and to be determined in their actions only by their own will, and consequently to be responsible only to themselves, and then to the society to which they belong, but only in so far as they have made a free decision to belong to it.
• [The State] is the declaration of the worthlessness and unreasonableness of every individual in the name of the wisdom and virtue of all.
• Every State, even the most republican and the most democratic State--even the would-be people’s State conceived by Marx--is in its essence only a machine governing the masses from above, through an intelligent and therefore privileged minority, allegedly knowing the genuine interests of the people better than the people themselves.

Hosea Ballou

• The severest punishment suffered by a sensitive mind, for injury inflicted upon another, is the consciousness of having done it.
• There is nothing that needs to be said in an unkind manner.
• Doubt that creed which you cannot reduce to practice.
• The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper and render them more important.

Honore de Balzac

• Marriage must be content with a monster that devoures everything: familiarity.

Tallulah Bankhead

• Cocaine isn't habit-forming. I should know - I've been using it for years."
• I'm as pure as the driven slush.

• These are my new shoes. They’re good shoes. They won’t make you rich like me, they won’t make you rebound like me, they definitely won’t make you handsome like me. They’ll only make you have shoes like me. That’s it.

• because rights legitimate the use of force, the more rights we recognize the more violence we legitimate.

P. T. Barnum

• There's a sucker born every minute.

Lawrence Barrett

• An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.

Dave Barry

• Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.

Frederic Bastiat

• Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Charles Beard

• It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.

August Bebel

• The field of politics always presents the same struggle. There are the Right and the Left, and in the middle is the Swamp. The Swamp is made up of know-nothings, of them who are without ideas, of them who are always with the majority.

Sir Thomas Beecham

• All the arts in America are a gigantic racket run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women.

Henry Ward Beecher

• Conceited men often seem a harmless kind of men, who, by an overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all.
• Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right use of strength.
• Some people are proud of their humility.
• The things required for prosperous labor, prosperous manufacturers, and prosperous commerce are three. First, liberty; second, liberty; third, liberty.
• Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.
• A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
• Many men want religion as a sort of lightning-rod to their houses, to ward off, by and by, the bolts of divine wrath.
• The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature.
• Temptations without imply desires within.
• I would rather speak the truth to ten men than blandishments and lying to a million.
• The ideal with which you go forth to measure things determines the nature, so far as you are concerned, of everything you meet.
• It is not hard work that kills men, it is worry.

Ludwig von Beethoven

• (On his deathbed) "Applaud friends, the comedy is over."

Robert Benchley

• There are said to be two classes of people in the world: those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.
• Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

Bruce Benson

• ...development of monarchical government led to the creation of criminal law as a source of royal revenues, and this criminalization took away the private rights to restitution and significantly reduced the incentives to voluntarily cooperate in law enforcement.

Jeremy Bentham

• Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

Thomas Hart Benton

• An art school is a place for young girls to pass the time between high school and marriage.

Isaiah Berlin

• All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning, is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

Hector Berlioz

• Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Dale Berra

• The similarities between me and my father are different.

Yogi Berra

• Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.
• Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
• On the election of the first Jewish mayor of Dublin, Ireland: "It could only happen in America."
• You can observe a lot by watching.

Ambrose Bierce

• Take not God's name in vain; select a time when it will have effect.
• Brain : The apparatus with which we think we think.
• Christian: One who thinks the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
• A clergyman is a man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.
• Conservative, n: a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
• Egoist: A person of low taste. More interested in himself than in me.
• Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
• Fashion: A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.
• Genealogy: An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own."
• History, n: an account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
• Male, n: a member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the human race ... has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.
• Marriage, n: ... a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
• Peace, n: in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
• Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
• Politics, n: a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
• Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
• A prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
• Revolution, n: in politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
• Our vocabulary is defective; we give the same name to woman's lack of temptation and man's lack of opportunity.
• I think that I think, therefore, I think I am. Cognito cognito, ergo cognito sum.

Josh Billings

• The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease.
• Credit is like chastity, they can both stand temptation better than suspicion.
• If a man is right, he can't be too radical; if he is wrong, he can't be too conservative.
• If it wasn't for faith, there would be no living in this world; we couldn't even eat hash with any safety.
• Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
• Most of the happiness in this world consists in possessing what others can't get.
• If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spectacles, safe on her nose all the time.
• The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so.
• There are but few men who have character enough to lead a life of idleness.
• As long as we are lucky we attribute it to our smartness; our bad luck we give the gods credit for.
• Metaphysics is the science of proving what we do not understand.
• As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of demand.

Augustine Birrell

• Any ordinary man can ... surround himself with two thousand books ... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.

Arthur Bloch

• There's no time like the present for postponing what you don't want to do.
• Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
• A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
• Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
• Teamwork is essential. It allows you to blame someone else.
• If you have watched a TV series only once, and you watch it again, it will be a rerun of the same episode.
• If there are only two shows worth watching, they will be on at the same time.

Leon Blum

• The free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought.

Napoleon Bonaparte

• History is fraud agreed upon.
• Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

William E. Borah

• Of all times in time of war the press should be free.
• The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their government.

Max Born

• Only two possibilities exist: either one must believe in determinism and regard free will as a subjective illusion, or one must become a mystic and regard the discovery of natural laws as a meaningless intellectual game.

Randolph Bourne

• Good discussion is a kind of detective uncovering the hidden categories and secret springs of emotions that underlie "opinions" on things.
• A good discussion ... is fundamentally a cooperation. It progresses towards some common understanding.
• War is essentially the health of the State.
• Only when the State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple and uncritical patriotic devotion, cooperation of services, which have been the ideal of the Sate lover.

C. N. Bovee

• Bad taste is a species of bad morals.
• We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.
• The legitimate aim of criticism is to direct attention to the excellent.
• Flirtation is a circulating library in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume.
• Repose without stagnation is the state most favorable to happiness.
• Passion looks not beyond the moment of its existence. Better, it says, the kisses of love today, than the felicities of heaven afar off.
• Silence, when nothing need be said, is the eloquence of discretion.
• Hard workers are usually honest. Industry lifts them above temptation.

Thomas K. Bowden

• Letter from Vietnam to his father, 1968: "We are the unwilling working for the unqualified to do the unnecessary for the ungrateful."

Congressman John Bowman

• If crime went down 100%, it would still be fifty times higher than it should be.

Frances Herbert Bradley

• His mind is open; yes, it is so open that nothing is retained; ideas simply pass through him.
• Metaphysics is finding bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

Omar Bradley

• The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

Louis D. Brandeis

• The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.
• Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.

Gerald Brenan

• Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

• Love and compassion
  there day is coming.
  All else are
  castles built in the air.

David Broder

• Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.

Phillips Brooks

• Great is the conduct of a man who lets rewards take care of themselves--come if they will or fail to come--but goes on his way, true to the truth simply because it is true, strongly loyal to the right for its pure righteousness.

Henry Brougham

• A lawyer is a learned person who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it himself.

David Brown

• "No Stamp Act, No Sedition, No Alien Bills, No Land Tax: Downfall to the Tyrants of America, peace and retirement President (Adams), long live the Vice-President (Jefferson) and the minority; may moral virtue be the basis of civil government." (For this inscription on a liberty pole erected in Dedham, Mass. Brown served two years in prison.)

Heywood Broun

• The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice so pleasurable that I assume it must be evil.
• If anyone corrects your pronunciation of a word in a public place, you have every right to punch him in the nose.

H. Rap Brown

• Being a man is the continuing battle of one's life. One loses a bit of manhood with every stale compromise to the authority of any power in which one does not believe.

Pearl Buck

• We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country.

Charles Bukowski

• The difference between a Democracy and a Dictatorship is that in a Democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a Dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.

Luther Burbank

• The idea that a good God would send people to a burning Hell is utterly damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed! I don't want to have anything to do with such a God. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to me.

Robert Jones Burdette

• Don't believe the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing--it was here first.

Gelett Burgess

• She was only sixteen; but what does that matter when one is young.

Edmund Burke

• The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
• You may criticize freely upon the Chinese constitution, and observe with as much severity as you please upon the absurd tricks of destructive bigotry of the Bonzees. But the scene is changed as you come homeward, and atheism or treason may be the names given to what would be reason and truth if asserted of China.
• All protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, the protestantism of the Protestant religion.
• All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

Kenneth Burke

• To prove that a church was needed for a medieval system of society does not prove that it is needed for ours.

George Burns

• The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

William Burroughs

• A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what’s going on.

George Bush

• "Look, I want to give the high five symbol to high tech. ... The truth is, it reminds a lot of people of the way I pitch horseshoes. Would you believe some of the people? Would you believe our dog?" George Bush in a speech given at a Ford Aerospace plant

Joseph Butler

• There is a principle of reflection in men, by which they distinguish between, approve and disapprove their own actions. We are plainly constituted such sort of creatures as to reflect upon our own nature. The mind can take a view of what passes within itself, its propensions, aversions, passions, affections, as respecting such objects, and in such degrees; and of the several actions consequent thereupon. ... This principle in man, by which he approves or disapproves his heart, temper, and actions is conscience.
• A man can as little doubt whether his eyes were given him to see with, as he can doubt of the truth of the science of optics, deduced from ocular experiments. And allowing the inward feeling, shame; a man can as little doubt whether it was given him to prevent his doing shameful actions, as he can doubt whether his eyes were given him to guide his steps.

Samuel Butler

• All of the animals excepting man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.
• Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
• Cursed is he that does not know when to shut his mind. An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in it or out of it. It should be capable of shutting its doors sometimes, or may be found a little draughty.
• Never read anything until not having read it has bothered you for some time.

Smedley Butler (commanding general of the U.S. Marine Corps)

• I was a gangster for Wall Street: I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914; I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in; I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Bros. in 1909-1912; I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916; and I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.
• War is a racket.

Mather Byles

• Which is better, to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?

Go to C authors.

Go back to the list of authors.

Back to Libertarian Essays by Roy Halliday

This page was last updated on June 6, 2002.
This site is maintained by Roy Halliday. If you have any comments or suggestions, please send them to royhalliday@mindspring.com.