Leonard E. Read Quotes & Sayings

Liberty can't be saved by those who retire into their ivory towers or take to the hills, so to speak, to bemoan its plight.2 It is the individual who is active who pushes liberty over the brink - or rescues her - depending on the nature of his actions. Inactive people are as uninfluential on this question as is any inert mass. — Leonard E. Read

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth. — Leonard E. Read

MY THESIS, in simplest terms, is: Let anyone do anything he pleases, so long as it is peaceful; the role of government, then, is to keep the peace ... Keeping the peace means no more than prohibiting persons from unpeaceful actions ... When government goes beyond this, that is, when government prohibits peaceful actions, such prohibitions themselves are, prima facie, unpeaceful. — Leonard E. Read