Justice and Equality

Religion is what keeps the poor man from murdering the rich.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.

Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.

Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.

It is because it’s prohibited. See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.

If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie that one party can only gain at the expense of another.

The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all.

He who seeks equality amongst unequals seeks the absurd .

The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success).

[The] self overcoming of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has given itself--mercy...

All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things.

Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.

All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.