Freedom:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!" -- The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly ... When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it." -- Bill Clinton (April 19 1994, on MTV)

"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." -- Alexis de Tocqueville

“The meaning of economic freedom is this: that the individual is in a position to choose the way in which he wants to integrate himself into the totality of society.” -- Ludwig von Mises

“Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government- that it is not a charter _for_ government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection _against_ the government.” -- Ayn Rand

“The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.” -- Walter Williams

Race:
"Yes, we want to be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. But what makes up character? If we don't take race as part of our character, then we are kidding ourselves."--Hillary Clinton at a Martin Luther King Day ceremony, quoted in the New York Sun (1-21-2003)

Equality:
"Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery." -- James Fenimore Cooper

"Mystical references to "society" and its programs to "help" may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats." -- Thomas Sowell

"The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to 'help.' " -- Thomas Sowell

"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights." -- H.L. Mencken

Individualism:
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." -- Ayn Rand

Economics:
"The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else." -- Frederic Bastiat

"Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear." -- Ayn Rand

"In war, the stronger overcomes the weaker. In business, the stronger imparts strength to the weaker." -- Frederic Bastiat

"If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper.
When people have learned this lesson, everyone will seek his individual welfare in the general welfare. Then jealousies between man and man, city and city, province and province, nation and nation, will no longer trouble the world." -- Frederic Bastiat

"We do not hear the term "compassionate" applied to business executives or entrepreneurs, certainly not when they are engaged in their normal work. Yet in terms of results in the measurable form of jobs created, lives enriched, communities built, living standards raised, and poverty healed, a handful of capitalists has done infinitely more for mankind than all the self-serving politicians, academics, social workers, and religionists who march under the banner of "compassion"." -- Nathaniel Branden

"The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit." -- Samuel Gompers

"...it is solely bigness in business which makes it possible to supply the masses with all those products the present-day American common man does not want to do without. Luxury goods for the few can be produced in small shops. Luxury goods for t he many require big business." -- Ludwig von Mises

"Business is a means- the only means- to increase the quantity of goods available for preserving life and rendering it more agreeable." -- Ludwig von Mises

"Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups- workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers- exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society- the symbol of America." -- Ayn Rand

"Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen." -- Ayn Rand

“Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.” -- Winston Churchill

“Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow...” -- Ludwig von Mises

“Competition on the market aims at assigning to every individual that function in the social system in which he can render to all his fellow men the most valuable of the services he is able to perform.“ -- Ludwig von Mises

“What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you.” -- Ludwig von Mises

“Capitalists are motivated not chiefly by the desire to consume wealth or indulge their appetites, but by the freedom and power to consummate their entrepreneurial ideas.“ -- George Gilder

”The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power. How naive the cliche that money is the root of evil!” -- Eric Hoffer

"Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of 'greed' is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or want to keep what they have already earned- never to those wanting to take other people's money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largess dispensed from some taxation." -- Thomas Sowell