Walter E. Williams has never let the mainstream narrative dictate his deeply cherished political and economic beliefs. His many academic distinctions aside, that alone makes him a paragon for other libertarians to look up to.

In his essay On Liberty, Mill discussed the nature and limits of the influence society should hold over an individual. It was in this essay that Mill expounded on the harm principle, which holds that power is only rightly exercised when the authority’s goal “is to prevent harm to others.” Those “incapable of self-government” (including children and barbarous peoples) were excluded from the protections prescribed by this principle.

Spooner’s legacy doesn’t only endure through affordable postage. He greatly influenced the early libertarian theory and the Austrian School of economics. Lysander Spooner quotes taken from The Unconstitutionality of Slavery were cited in District of Columbia v. Heller, a landmark case in which the Supreme Court ruled to preserve Second Amendment rights.

Robert Nozick was one of Harvard’s most distinguished professors, a president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and the author of several influential books. Robert Nozick quotes, while not as numerous as those of better-known libertarian thought leaders (Murray Rothbard and Friedrich Hayek come to mind) are nevertheless illuminating.

Thomas Sowell quotes are music to the ears of conservatives, libertarians, and anyone else who has actually put some thought into forming their economic and political beliefs.

Don’t ask yourself whether censorship is ever justifiable. The First Amendment recognizes the existence of a God-given right; it doesn’t grant it, and nothing can take it away. Instead ask yourself who is censoring, why they are so driven to do so, and how they will wield such awesome power in the coming decades if they’re allowed to hone it even further.

Never accept limits to your liberty in consideration of greater protection. The people offering you that protection are by far the most dangerous thing you will ever encounter. And although liberty must be earned by the hardest of people making the greatest of sacrifices, it is as vulnerable as a Fabergé egg in a daycare for children with inner ear infections. Forfeit even the tiniest little piece of it, and the despots, the bureaucrats, and the sadists who infest government will inevitably clamor for the next. And the next. And the next.

Atlas Shrugged tells the story of Dagny Taggart, a railroad executive living in a United States that is on the verge of economic collapse. The government is increasingly expanding its control over private enterprise, choking it out of existence; Dagny’s friend and childhood love Francisco d’Anconia may soon lose his family’s copper company as the Mexican government nationalizes it; and Hank Rearden, who refuses to sell his revolutionary Rearden Metal to the government, subsequently learns his invention has been condemned by the same for no real reason.

1984 quotes pop up on social media relentlessly these days. Why is it that Eric Arthur Blair (better known by his pen name George Orwell), an English novelist, essayist and journalist whose entire life experience was limited to the first half of the 20th century, remains so relevant to this day? Because Orwell, when confronted by the smudgy veneer of government and politics, saw through it to the brutal nastiness which despotism’s worst elements have in store for mankind.

Why should you, an extremely intelligent – and, for that matter, attractive – person care about Voltaire quotes? François-Marie Arouet (1694 – 1778), who is better known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was one of the most prolific writers of the French Enlightenment. As a historian, philosopher, polemicist, and pen pal to numerous important figures of his time, Voltaire was a vehement advocate for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, civil liberties, and the separation of church and state.