Walter E. Williams famous quotes

In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Responsibility #Government #Liberty

How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people.
-- Walter E. Williams

#People #Doe #Done

But let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you - and why?
-- Walter E. Williams

#Justice #Definitions #Social

No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Giving #Religion #Liberty

Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Men #People #Fellow Man

Three-fifths to two-thirds of the federal budget consists of taking property from one American and giving it to another. Were a private person to do the same thing, we'd call it theft. When government does it, we euphemistically call it income redistribution, but that's exactly what thieves do - redistribute income. Income redistribution not only betrays the founders' vision, it's a sin in the eyes of God.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Eye #Government #Two

Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Liberty #Democracy #Littles

I believe our nation is at a point where there are enough irreconcilable differences between those Americans who want to control other Americans and those Americans who want to be left alone that separation is the only peaceable alternative. Just as in a marriage where vows are broken, our rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution have been grossly violated by a government instituted to protect them. These constitutional violations have increased independent of whether there's been a Democrat-controlled Washington or a Republican-controlled Washington.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Believe #Independent #Rights

If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Liberty #Economic #Persons

Communism and socialism is [sic] seductive. It promises us that people will contribute according to ability and receive according to needs. Everybody is equal. Everybody has a right to decent housing, decent food and affordable medical care. History should have taught us that when we hear people talk this stuff - watch out!
-- Walter E. Williams

#People #Seductive #Promise

I was more than anything a radical. I was more sympathetic to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King because Malcolm X was more of a radical who was willing to confront discrimination in ways that I thought it should be confronted, including perhaps the use of violence. But I really just wanted to be left alone. I thought some laws, like minimum-wage laws, helped poor people and poor black people and protected workers from exploitation. I thought they were a good thing until I was pressed by professors to look at the evidence.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Kings #Law #People

There are many farm handouts; but let's call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, "Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you."
-- Walter E. Williams

#Giving #Office #Liberty

However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Hurt #Heart #Men

There are people in need of help. Charity is one of the nobler human motivations. The act of reaching into one's own pockets to help a fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else's pocket is despicable and worthy of condemnation.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Motivation #Men #People

Reduced employment opportunities is one effect of minimum wage legislation. The minimum wage law has imposed incalculable harm on the disadvantaged members of our society. The only moral thing to do is to repeal it.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Opportunity #Law #Minimum Wage

Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top".
-- Walter E. Williams

#Powerful #Men #Thinking

I believe in helping our fellow man in need. I believe that reaching into your own pockets to help someone in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into somebody else's pockets to help your fellow man in need is despicable. And, or those of us who are Christians, I'm very sure that when God gave Moses the commandment Thou Shalt Not Steal, he did not mean ...unless you get a majority vote in Congress.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Christian #Believe #Mean

Try this thought experiment. Pretend you're a tyrant. Among your many liberty-destroying objectives are extermination of blacks, Jews and Catholics. Which would you prefer, a United States with political power centralized in Washington, powerful government agencies with detailed information on Americans and compliant states or power widely dispersed over 50 states, thousands of local jurisdictions and a limited federal government?
-- Walter E. Williams

#Powerful #Agency #Government

Increases in money supply are what constitute inflation, and a general rise in prices is the symptom.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Liberty #Economic #Symptoms

I don't know about you, but if you hear that Williams guns have been taken, you'll know Williams is dead.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Taken #Gun

The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Government #Essence #Evil

Conservatives and liberals are kindred spirits as far as government spending is concerned. First, let's make sure we understand what government spending is. Since government has no resources of its own, and since there's no Tooth Fairy handing Congress the funds for the programs it enacts, we are forced to recognize that government spending is no less than the confiscation of one person's property to give it to another to whom it does not belong - in effect, legalized theft.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Government #Giving #Liberty

A caged canary is safe but not free.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Liberty #Safe #Canaries

Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks. The compelling issue to both conservatives and liberals is not whether it is legitimate for government to confiscate one's property to give to another, the debate is over the disposition of the pillage.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Believe #Thinking #Government

Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one's fellow man ... that's what competition is all about: "outpleasing" your competitors to win over the consumers.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Successful #Winning #Men

Here's Williams' roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Jobs #Children #School

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
-- Walter E. Williams

#School #Common Sense #People

What we call the market is really a democratic process involving millions, and in some markets billions, of people making personal decisions that express their preferences. When you hear someone say that he doesn't trust the market, and wants to replace it with government edicts, he's really calling for a switch from a democratic process to a totalitarian one.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Government #People #Decision

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Wise #Class #Envy

Trying to get government to be as efficient as business is as hopeless as trying to teach cats to bark and dogs to meow.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Dog #Cat #Government

Reaching into someone else's pocket to assist one's fellow man hardly qualifies as charity.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Men #Charity #Fellow Man

Whenever there's a tragedy involving gun use, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the gun-control lobby and the news media seize it as another opportunity to exploit the emotions of uninformed American people for political gain.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Gun #Opportunity #Media

The public good is promoted best by people pursuing their own private interests. This bothers some people because they're more concerned with motives than with results.
-- Walter E. Williams

#People #Results #Interest

If we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important, or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists a freer hand to attack our property.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Hands #Rights #Giving

The only organized political party with a Christian vision of morality is the Libertarian Party.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Christian #Party #Political

As American education and intelligence becomes replaced by feelings and emotion, not seeing the forest for the trees has become a major problem.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Tree #Feelings #Forests

The only way Congress can get one dollar to spend is to take that one dollar from Americans, borrow that one dollar from Americans, or inflate that one dollar from Americans. So, it's very much like the visual image of a swimming pool. A person notes there is a shallow end, so he takes the water out of the deep end and pours it in the shallow end, hoping to raise the height of the water in the pool - and you would call that person stupid.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Stupid #Swimming #Water

I learned that you have to evaluate the effects of public policy as opposed to intentions.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Intention #Policy #Public Policy

If the States do not have the right to secede, then they have no rights at all.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Rights #Revolution #States

If the Constitution framers would come back today, they would have contempt for most of us.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Today #Constitution #Framers

The bottom line is that we've become a nation of thieves, a value rejected by our founders. James Madison, the father of our Constitution, was horrified when Congress appropriated $15,000 to help French refugees. He said, 'I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.' Tragically, today's Americans would run Madison out of town on a rail.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Running #Father #Thieves

Many politicians and pundits claim that the credit crunch and high mortgage foreclosure rate is an example of market failure and want government to step in to bail out creditors and borrowers at the expense of taxpayers who prudently managed their affairs. These financial problems are not market failures but government failure. ... The credit crunch and foreclosure problems are failures of government policy.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Government #Bail #Credit

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
-- Walter E. Williams

#Men #Government #Consent

Multiculturalists argue that different cultural values are morally equivalent. That's nonsense.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Different #Arguing #Nonsense

When the history of the 20th century is finally written, one of its key features will be the wanton slaughter of more than 170 million people, not in war, but by their own government. The governments that led in this slaughter are the former USSR (65 million) and the Peoples Republic of China (35-40 million). The point to remember is that these governments were the idols of America's leftists. Part of the reason for these and other tyrannical successes was because the people were first disarmed.
-- Walter E. Williams

#War #Keys #Government

Take Washington, D.C., which spends over $10,000 per student for education whose student achievement would be dead last if Mississippi chose to secede from the Union. Suppose Washington gave each parent even a $5,000 voucher - that wouldn't mean less money available per student. To the contrary, holding total education expenditures constant, it'd mean more money per student remaining in public schools.
-- Walter E. Williams

#School #Mean #Achievement

Elect me to office. I will protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. Because there's no constitutional authority for Congress spending on the objects of benevolence, don't expect for me to vote for prescription drugs for the elderly, handouts to farmers and food stamps for the poor. Instead, I'll fight these and other unconstitutional congressional expenditures”? I'll tell you how many votes he'll get: It will be Williams' vote, and that's it.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Fighting #Elderly #Office

All we have to do now is to inform the public that the payment of social security taxes is voluntary and watch the mass exodus.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Money #Irs #Taxation

School choice opponents are also dishonest when they speak of saving public schools. A Heritage Foundation survey found that 47 percent of House members and 51 percent of senators with school-age children enrolled them in private schools in 2001. Public school teachers enroll their children in private schools to a much greater extent than the general public, in some cities close to 50 percent.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Teacher #Children #School

When the Founders thought of democracy, they saw democracy in the political sphere - a sphere strictly limited by the Constitution's well-defined and enumerated powers given the federal government. Substituting democratic decision making for what should be private decision making is nothing less than tyranny dressed up.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Government #Decision #Political

No matter how much of our liberty Washington takes away in the name of security, there are no guarantees that there won't be another terrorist attack. Instead of attacking American liberties, the government ought to go after terrorists in their countries of origin. It should be like what our military attempted during WWII. Don't wait to defend ships against the kamikaze -- bomb the fields where they take off.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Country #Military #Names

The Founders knew that a democracy would lead to some kind of tyranny. The term democracy appears in none of our Founding documents. Their vision for us was a Republic and limited government.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Government #Vision #Liberty

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 E. Williams

#Gun #Hunting #Ducks

Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We're working on a third generation which has little in the way of education about what our Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we've fallen easy prey to charlatens, quacks, and hustlers.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Mean #Government #Important

How you make it in this world, for the most part, depends more on what you do as opposed to whether people like or dislike you. In order to produce a successful life, one must find ways to please his fellow man. That is, find out what goods and services his fellow man values, and is willing to pay for, and then acquire the necessary skills and education to provide it.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Successful #Men #Order

Discrimination is simply the act of choice. Scarcity requires us to choose; scarcity is the cause of discrimination!
-- Walter E. Williams

#Choices #Causes #Scarcity

In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician's major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Faithful #Ignorant #Liberty

Today's liberals wish to disarm us so they can run their evil and oppressive agenda on us. The fight against crime is just a convenient excuse to further their agenda. I don't know about you, but if you hear that Williams' guns have been taken, you'll know Williams is dead.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Running #Taken #Fighting

The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'.
-- Walter E. Williams

#War #Men #Odds

You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. ... Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Ignorance #Hands #Evil

Legislators aren't known for being rocket scientists.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Political #Rockets #Scientist

We might think of dollars as being 'certificates of performance.' The better I serve my fellow man, and the higher the value he places on that service, the more certificates of performance he gives me. The more certificates I earn, the greater my claim on the goods my fellow man produces. That's the morality of the market. In order for one to have a claim on what his fellow man produces, he must first serve him.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Men #Thinking #Order

If our country is to survive and prosper, we must summon the courage to condemn and reject the liberal agenda, and we had better do it soon.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Country #Liberty #Agendas

Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is a protector of rights.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Rights #Government #Liberty

If we're ignorant of the historical sacrifices that made our liberties possible, we will be less likely to make the sacrifices again so that those liberties are preserved for future generations. And, if we're ignorant, we won't even know when government infringes on our liberties. Moreover, we'll happily cast our votes for those who'd destroy our liberties.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Sacrifice #Government #Historical

When it came to the 2000 election, 84 percent of Ivy League faculty voted for Al Gore, 6 percent for Ralph Nader and 9 percent for George Bush. In the general electorate, the vote was split at 48 percent for Gore and Bush, and 3 percent for Nader.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Ivy #League #Splits

Having children is not an act of God. It's not like you're walking down the street and pregnancy strikes you; children are a result of a conscious decision. For the most part, female-headed households are the result of short-sighted, self-destructive behavior of one or two people.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Children #Pregnancy #Self

Most of our country's serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Country #White #Feet

Minimum-wage laws are one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of racists.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Powerful #Law #Liberty

Government is necessary, but the only rights we can delegate to government are the ones we possess. For example, we all have a natural right to defend ourselves against predators. Since we possess that right, we can delegate authority to government to defend us. By contrast, we don't have a natural right to take the property of one person to give to another; therefore, we cannot legitimately delegate such authority to government.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Rights #Government #Giving

Profit is vital to human well-being. Profit is the payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants and do so in a way that economizes on society's scarce resources.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Order #Land #Entrepreneur

In general, presidents and congressmen have very limited power to do good for the economy and awesome power to do bad. The best good thing that politicians can do for the economy is to stop doing bad. In part, this can be achieved through reducing taxes and economic regulation, and staying out of our lives.
-- Walter E. Williams

#President #Regulation #Politician

Charity is reaching into one's own pockets to assist his fellow man in need. Reaching into someone else's pocket to assist one's fellow man hardly qualifies as charity. When done privately, we deem it theft, and the individual risks jail time.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Men #Jail #Risk

The true test of one's commitment to liberty and private property rights doesn't come when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we agree. The true test comes when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we disagree.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Commitment #Rights #People

If there's a distinct group of Americans who harbor open contempt for constitutional principles and rule of law, it's lawyers, judges and members of Congress.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Law #Judging #Political

Poverty in Egypt, or anywhere else, is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People are poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. They can produce things highly valued by others but are hampered or prevented from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Egypt #Volunteer #People

It was not until the Abraham Lincoln administration that an income tax was imposed on Americans. Its stated purpose was to finance the war, but it took until 1872 for it to be repealed. During the Grover Cleveland administration, Congress enacted the Income Tax Act of 1894. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1895. It took the Sixteenth Amendment (1913) to make permanent what the Framers feared -- today's income tax.
-- Walter E. Williams

#War #Income #Purpose

If you hate my guts and have designs to hurt me, and I see you building a cannon aimed at my house, I am not going to wait for you to finish construction.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Hurt #Hate #House

Legality alone is no guide for a moral people. There are many things in this world that have been, or are, legal but clearly immoral. Slavery was legal. Did that make it moral? South Africa’s apartheid, Nazi persecution of Jews, and Stalinist and Maoist purges were all legal, but did that make them moral?
-- Walter E. Williams

#People #World #Slavery

We should view our government the way we should a friendly, cuddly lion. Just because he's friendly and cuddly shouldn't blind us to the fact that he's still got teeth and claws.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Views #Government #Friendly

(F)or 50 years, the well-meaning leftist agenda has been able to do to blacks what Jim Crow and harsh discrimination could never have done: family breakdown, illegitimacy and low academic achievement.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Years #Achievement #Crow

Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Office #Giving #Use

Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don't know whom to blame for their calamity.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Simple #Tariffs #Blame

For black politicians, civil rights organizations and white liberals to support the racist practices of the University of Michigan amounts to no less than a gross betrayal of the civil rights principles of our historic struggle from slavery to the final guarantee of constitutional rights to all Americans. Indeed, it was practices like those of the University of Michigan, but against blacks, that were the focal point of much of the civil rights movement.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Betrayal #Struggle #Rights

...[I]f we care about our remaining liberties we must at some point draw a line in the sand and let politicians and bureaucrats know we will not tolerate further encroachment on our God-given rights to liberty.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Rights #Liberty #Care

According to the Institute for International Economics, trade barriers cost American consumers $80 billion a year or more than $1,200 per family.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Years #Cost #Economics

In 302, the Roman emperor Diocletian commanded "there should be cheapness," declaring, "Unprincipled greed appears wherever our armies ... march. ... Our law shall fix a measure and a limit to this greed." The predictable result of Diocletian's food price controls were black markets, hunger and food confiscation by his soldiers. Despite the disastrous history of price controls, politicians never manage to resist tampering with prices -- that's not a flattering observation of their learning abilities.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Army #Law #Greed

Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation's tyrants and their useful idiots. ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States.
-- Walter E. Williams

#War #School #Government

Diversity worship and multiculturalism are currency and cause for celebration at just about any college. If one is black, brown, yellow or white, the prevailing thought is that he should take pride and celebrate that fact even though, just as in the case of my eye color, he had nothing to do with it. The multiculturist and diversity crowd see race as an achievement. In my book, race might be an achievement, worthy of considerable celebration, only if a person was born white and through his effort and diligence became black.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Book #Eye #Pride

For the multiculturist/diversity crowd, culture, ideas, customs, arts and skills are a matter of racial membership where one has no more control over his culture than his race. That's a racist idea, but it's politically correct racism. It says that one's convictions, character and values are not determined by personal judgment and choices but genetically determined. In other words, as yesteryear's racists held: race determines identity.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Art #Character #Race

Say that Congress legislates gasoline price controls that sets a maximum price of $1 a gallon. As sure as night follows day, there'd be long lines and gasoline shortages, just as there were in the 1970s. For the average consumer, a $1.60 a gallon selling price and no waiting lines is a darn sight cheaper than a controlled $1 a gallon price plus searching for a gasoline station that has gas and then waiting in line. If your average purchase is 10 gallons, and if an hour or so of your time is worth more that $6, the $1.60 a gallon free market price is cheaper.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Night #Sight #Average

The bottom line is that the true test of one's commitment to freedom of association doesn't come when he allows people to associate in ways he approves. The true test of that commitment comes when he allows people to be free to voluntarily associate in ways he deems despicable. Forced association is not freedom of association.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Commitment #People #Lines

The greatest percentage of poverty is found in female-headed households. Over 70 percent of female-headed households are poor. A large percentage of poor people are children (17 percent); fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.
-- Walter E. Williams

#Children #People #Black