Over at The Dispatch (ungated here) I have a critique of the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. As I say, Bartlett’s is “the gold standard of quotations, the place anyone can go to confirm a quote and see the source.” But its editors “seem far more familiar with the words of liberal, leftist, and socialist sources than those of conservatives and libertarians.”

Over the past 40 years, since the rise of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, and even Deng Xiaoping, the world has seen a turn toward markets and economic freedom (albeit with a fall in 2020 during the pandemic lockdowns). But the thinkers and leaders of that historic change are heavily underrepresented in Bartlett’s.

F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand get four citations each, which is slightly better than the 1992 and 2012 editions. But Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels), whose intellectual stock is surely declining, has risen from 18 citations to 23 in the years since the collapse of Soviet communism.

P. J. O’Rourke gets only one citation. John Rawls is included, but not Robert Nozick. Reagan, one of our most quotable presidents, is represented with 11 quotes, up from 3 in the 1992 edition. Barack Obama gets 21 and John F. Kennedy 29.

In the interest of helping out the editors of the next edition, below I include some quotations that seem to me at least as “familiar” and/​or “worthy of perpetuation” as many of the Bartlett’s selections. (If your favorite quotation is not here, it just might be in Bartlett’s.)

The Bible

Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king.

And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.

And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.

And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

I Samuel 8 (King James Version)

Lao-tzu

Without law or compulsion, men would dwell in harmony. I Ching, 32

The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be.

The more laws are promulgated, The more thieves and bandits there will be.

Therefore a sage has said:

So long as I “do nothing” the people will of themselves be transformed.

So long as I love quietude, the people will of themselves go straight.

So long as I act only by inactivity the people will of themselves become prosperous. I Ching, 57

The people starve because those above them eat too much tax-grain. That is the only reason why they starve. The people are difficult to keep in order because those above them interfere. That is the only reason why they are so difficult to keep in order. I Ching, 75

John Locke

The end of Law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge Freedom: For in all the states of created beings capable of Laws, where there is no Law, there is no Freedom. For Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others which cannot be, where there is no Law: But Freedom is not, as we are told, A Liberty for every Man to do what he lists: (For who could be free, when every other Man’s Humour might domineer over him?) But a Liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists, his Persons, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, within the Allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his own. Second Treatise of Government

Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others. Second Treatise of Government

Adam Smith

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical. Manuscript, 1755

Thomas Paine

Could we take off the dark covering of antiquity … we should find the first [king] nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers. Common Sense

A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. Common Sense

There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes. Address to Addressers, 1792

In reviewing the history of the English government, its wars and its taxes, a by-stander, not blinded by prejudice, nor warped by interest, would declare, that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes. The Rights of Man

Thomas Jefferson

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none. First Inaugural Address

We have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Letter to William Ludlow, 1824

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. The form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason, and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the lights of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. Letter to the Mayor of Washington, 1826

Mary Wollstonecraft

The birthright of man … is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact, and the continued existence of that compact. A Vindication of the Rights of Men

“Consider, I address you as a legislator, whether, when men contend for their freedom, and to be allowed to judge for themselves respecting their own happiness, it be not inconsistent and unjust to subjugate women, even though you firmly believe that you are acting in the manner best calculated to promote their happiness?” A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Angelina Grimké

The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own. I have found the Anti-Slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our land—the school in which human rights are more fully investigated, and better understood and taught, than in any other. Letter to Catherine Beecher

E. L Godkin

To the principles and precepts of Liberalism the prodigious material progress of the age was largely due. Freed from the vexatious meddling of governments, men devoted themselves to their natural task, the bettering of their condition, with the wonderful results which surround us. But it now seems that its material comfort has blinded the eyes of the present generation to the cause which made it possible.…

Only a remnant, old men for the most part, still uphold the liberal doctrine, and when they are gone, it will have no champions.… The old fallacy of divine right has once more reasserted its power, and before it is again repudiated, there must be international struggles on a terrific scale. The Nation, 1900

H. L. Mencken

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule–and both commonly succeed, and are right. Minority Report

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. In Defense of Women

Isabel Paterson

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. The God of the Machine

If the full roll of sincere philanthropists were called, from the beginning of time, it would be found that all of them together by their strictly philanthropic activities have never conferred upon humanity one-tenth of the benefit derived from the normally self-interested efforts of Thomas Alva Edison, to say nothing of the greater minds who worked out the scientific principles which Edison applied. The God of the Machine

Ludwig von Mises

The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? Human Action

The ultimate ideal envisioned by liberalism is the perfect cooperation of all mankind, taking place peacefully and without friction. Liberal thinking always has the whole of humanity in view and not just parts. It does not stop at limited groups; it does not end at the border of the village, of the province, of the nation, or of the continent. Its thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical: it takes in all men and the whole world. Liberalism is, in this sense, humanism; and the liberal, a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite. Liberalism

F. A. Hayek

Mr. [Irving R.] Levine: How do you cure inflation?

Dr. Von Hayek: You stop printing money.…In a sense, stopping the printing presses is a figurative expression, because it is being done now by creating credit by the Federal Reserve System.

“Meet the Press,” June 22, 1975, NBC News

Our civilisation depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism. The Fatal Conceit

“Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded – and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist. Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 3

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty. The Intellectuals and Socialism

Milton Friedman

Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system. Donahue, 1979

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

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. The Open Mind, PBS, 1975

Samuel Brittan

Competitive capitalism is the biggest single force acting on the side of what it is fashionable to call “permissiveness,” but what was once known as personal liberty. Capitalism and the Permissive Society

The revolt of young people against the pattern of their lives being decided by others or by impersonal forces they cannot influence is fundamentally justified. Precisely the same arguments are to be found in the classical defences of free markets, private property and limited government. Capitalism and the Permissive Society

Robert Conquest

“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” Or maybe “Every organisation behaves as if it is run by secret agents of its opponents.” Attributed, sometimes called “Conquest’s Third Law.”

John O’Sullivan

All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. National Review, June 26, 2003

Jacob T. Levy

Any right-of-center organization that is not explicitly Never Trump will tend over time to become MAGA. Facebook

Ayn Rand

No man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The Virtue of Selfishness

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. Atlas Shrugged

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage. Racism

Robert Nozick

Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). Anarchy, State, and Utopia

The fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organized, is whether there should be any state at all. Why not have anarchy? Anarchy, State, and Utopia

From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen. Anarchy, State, and Utopia

No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified. Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others. Anarchy, State, and Utopia

The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults. Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Thomas Sowell

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. Is Reality Optional?

Deirdre McCloskey

The Great Enrichment is the most important secular event since human beings first domesticated wheat and horses. It has been and will continue to be more important historically than the rise and fall of empires or the class struggle in all hitherto existing societies. Bourgeois Equality

Perhaps you yourself still believe in nationalism or socialism or proliferating regulation. And perhaps you are in the grip of pessimism about growth or consumerism or the environment or inequality. Please, for the good of the wretched of the earth, reconsider. Bourgeois Equality

The poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich. Bourgeois Dignity

P. J. O’Rourke

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. Parliament of Whores

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. Speech to the Cato Institute, 1993

There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself. Speech to the Cato Institute, 1993

I had one fundamental question about economics: Why do some countries prosper and thrive and others just suck? Eat the Rich

And hey, it’s my list: David Boaz

One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can’t tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, but a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism. The Libertarian Mind

More than libertarians often acknowledge, we live in a world of freedom and progress. We have extended the promises of the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — to people to whom they had long been denied around the world. More people in more countries than ever before in history enjoy religious freedom, personal freedom, democratic governance, the freedom to own and trade property, the chance to start a business, equal rights, civility, respect, and a longer life expectancy. War, disease, violence, slavery, and inhumanity have been dramatically reduced. And it is libertarian ideas and liberty‐​minded people that have made that happen. Cato Policy Report, May/​June 2020

When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. And today’s federal budget is the biggest picnic in history. Britannica Blog, July 25, 2011

And then some quotations not necessarily from libertarians but of interest to libertarians (or at least to me)

If now—and this is my idea—there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature … would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. William James, The Moral Equivalent of War

Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together. widely attributed to Barney Frank

Nobody shoots at Santa Claus. Al Smith

Gay is good. Frank Kameny

A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. Michael Kinsley

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Robert J. Hanlon

Always assume incompetence before looking for conspiracy. attributed to Machiavelli

I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing. Harry Willcock, on being asked to produce his national ID card, 1950

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Chapter VI

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Mad men in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler from a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interest is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.…It is ideas, not vested interest, which are dangerous for good or evil. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

The role of intellectuals [meaning people who strongly prefer reading and writing to physical exertion] is merely to provide the rhetoric of public interest that good manners decree should clothe the efforts of self-serving groups in the community. George Stigler, “The Intellectual and His Society”

Never knowingly support lies! Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live Not by Lies”