Libertarian Conservatives

"In the last decade or two there has grown up in this country, principally under the leadership of Professor Milton Friedman, a school calling itself the Monetarists. The leaders sometimes sum up their doctrine in the phrase: "Money matters," and even sometimes in the phrase: "Money matters most.""

"In brief, on net balance, machines, technological improvements, economies and efficiency do not throw men out of work."

"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

"About half a century before the Depression, a Yale philosopher named William Graham Sumner penned a lecture against the progressives of his own day and in defense of classical liberalism. The lecture eventually become an essay, titled "The Forgotten Man". Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects."

"728. Moral anarchy. The antagonism between a virtue policy and a success policy is a constant ethical problem. The Renaissance in Italy shows that although moral traditions may be narrow and mistaken, any morality is better than moral anarchy. Moral traditions are guides which no one can afford to neglect. They are in the mores and they are lost in every great revolution of the mores. Then the men are morally lost. Their notions, desires, purposes, and means become false, and even the notion of crime is arbitrary and untrue. If all try the policy of dishonesty, the result will be the firmest conviction that honesty is the best policy. The mores aim always to arrive at correct notions of virtue. In so far as they reach correct results the virtue policy proves to be the only success policy."

"You see the expansion of industrial power pushed forward by the energy, hope, and thrift of men, and you see the development arrested, diverted, crippled, and defeated by measures which are dictated by military considerations."

"The history of civil liberty is made up of campaigns against abuses of taxation. Protectionism is the great modern abuse of taxation; the abuse of taxation which is adapted to a republican form of government. Protectionism is now corrupting our political institutions just as slavery used to do."

"What we prepare for is what we shall get."

"The man who started with the notion that the world owed him a living would once more find, as he does now, that the world pays him its debt in the state prison."

"It is often said that the earth belongs to the race, as if raw land was a boon, or gift."

"As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X. … What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of. … He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays."

"Any prosperity policy is a delusion and a path to ruin. There is no economic lesson which the people of the United States need to take to heart more than that. In the second place the Spanish mistakes arose, in part, from confusing the public treasury with the national wealth."

"Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist."

"If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control."

"Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare."

"[on President Barack Obama's performance in the 2012 Presidential Debate of Oct 3, 2012] Can I state the obvious here, since we all have theories? The obvious is he he didn't bring his game because he doesn't have a game. They have now blamed his performance on everything from strategic — he's a unifier — that's belied by his campaign, calling Mitt Romney everything from a liar to a tax thief to a felon to a murderer to a dog abuser to a misogynist. This is one of the most negative campaigns in history..."

"What Brexit has proved, I'm afraid, is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were. We have mismanaged this totally and if you look at simple things, simple things such as takeovers, such as corporation tax, we are driving business away from our country. Arguably, now we are back in control, we are regulating our own businesses even more than they were as EU members. Brexit has failed."

"What a nonsense, sadly said under parliamentary privilege. I had two small appearance fees back then, well under £5,000 [in 2016 and 2017]. Not appeared since. [...] I didn't do anything with RT in 2018."

"We could have got it down to 50,000. If they put me in charge of it we would have got to 50,000 a year, no question about it, but they didn't."

"I hope this begins the end of this project. It is a bad project. It isn’t just undemocratic, it is antidemocratic. It puts in that front row, it gives people power without unaccountability. People who cannot be held to account by the electorate and that is an unacceptable structure."

"What happens at 11pm this Friday the 31st of January 2020 marks the point of no return. Once we’ve left, we’re never coming back and the rest frankly is detail. We’re going, and we will be gone. And that should be the summit of my own political ambitions. I walked in here, you all thought it was terribly funny but you stopped laughing in 2016. But my view of Europe has changed since I joined. In 2005, I saw the constitution that had been drafted… and saw it rejected by the French in a referendum. I saw it rejected by the Dutch in a referendum. And I saw you, in these institutions, ignore them. [You brought it back] as the Lisbon treaty, and boast you could ram it through without there being referendums. Well, the Irish did have a vote and did say no, and were forced to vote again. You’re very good at making people to vote again, but what we’ve proved is the British are too big to bully, thank goodness. So I became an outright opponent of the whole European project. I want Brexit to start a debate across the whole of Europe. What do we want from Europe? If we want trade, friendship cooperation, reciprocity, we don’t need a European Commission, we don’t need a European court. We don’t need these institutions and all of this power. And I can promise you, both in UKIP and in the Brexit party, we love Europe. We just hate the European Union."

"There is a historic battle going on across the west, in Europe, America, and elsewhere. It is globalism against populism. And you may loathe populism, but I’ll tell you a funny thing. It is becoming very popular! And it has great benefits. No more financial contributions, no more European Courts of Justice. No more European Common Fisheries Policy, no more being talked down to. No more being bullied, no more Guy Verhofstadt! What’s not to like. I know you’re going to miss us, I know you want to ban our national flags, but we’re going to wave you goodbye, and we’ll look forward in the future to working with you as a sovereign nation… [Farage is cut off by the chair]"

"They have ignored what was said in that Brexit referendum and so now a bigger question emerges as to how we are going to change politics in this country."

"When you get it out of the fridge it’s really appetising and delicious for a few days, but after a couple of weeks it stinks and is inedible."

"The withdrawal agreement is not Brexit. It is a betrayal of what 17.4 million people voted for. If you insist on the withdrawal agreement, Mr Johnson, we will fight you in every seat up and down the length and breadth of the United Kingdom."

"Do I find a seat to try get myself into parliament or do I serve the cause better traversing the length and breadth of the United Kingdom supporting 600 candidates, and I've decided the latter course is the right one."

"If we don’t leave on October 31, then the scores you’ve seen for the Brexit Party today will be repeated in a general election, and we are getting ready for it."

"Belgium is not a nation!"

"A Johnson government committed to doing the right thing and The Brexit Party working in tandem would be unstoppable."

"So this is it, the final chapter, the end of the road. A 47-year political experiment that the British frankly have never been very happy with. My mother and father signed up to a common market, not to a political union, flags, anthems, presidents, and now you even want your own army. For me, it has been 27 years of campaigning and over 20 years here in this parliament. I’m not particularly happy with the agreement we’re being asked to vote on tonight. But Boris has been remarkably bold in the last few months… he’s promised us there will be no level playing field, and on that basis, I wish him every success in the next round of negotiations, I really do."

"I wasn't in charge. Had we been a European country with proportional representation, I would have been in a position of authority to work with Government to try and achieve this."

"But if they don't deliver this Brexit that I spent 25 years of my life working for, then I will be forced to don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for the front lines."

"[T]he time has come for me to get off the fence and say that I do want to see Marine Le Pen win on Sunday. She would make a good leader of France and is the right candidate for Brexit Britain."

"There are about six million Jewish people living in America, so as a percentage it’s quite small, but in terms of influence it’s quite big. Well in terms of money and influence they are a powerful lobby and America has interfered elections all over the world for decades, there is a degree of hypocrisy. [...] he makes the point that there are powerful foreign lobbies in the US, and the Jewish lobby with its links to the Israeli government is one of those strong voices."

"If Brexit is a disaster, I will go and live abroad, I'll go and live somewhere else."

"Well, it's very successful politics, isn't it? You know, we are the turkeys that have voted for Christmas."

"It was always monstrous that she should be judged in the image of her father – an accusation many still make today. I wonder whether, had her surname not been "Le Pen", she might now be ahead in the polls. There is nothing she has said in this entire election campaign that I find unreasonable or extreme."

"We have nothing to fear and that is the reason why we should only accept a clean and clear Brexit, not some fudge."

"I destroyed the British National Party - we had a far-right party in this country who genuinely were anti-Jew, anti-Black, all of those things, and I came along, and said to their voters, if you're holding your nose and voting for this party as a protest, don't. Come and vote for me - I'm not against anybody, I just want us to start putting British people first, and I, almost single-handedly, destroyed the far-right in British politics. If I hadn't been around, and done what I'd done, that strain of opinion would've been represented by (former BNP leader) Nick Griffin, and the BNP, and would genuinely have been motivated by hate. I'm not motivated by that, I'm not against anybody."

"[A second referendum is] the last thing I want to see. It's not a game of the best of three."

"[Referring to his life after ceasing to be Ukip leader earlier in 2016] I am not having to deal with low-grade people every day, I am not responsible for what our branch secretary in Lower Slaughter said half-cut on Twitter last night – that isn't my fault any more. I don't have to go to eight-hour party executive meetings. I don't have to spend my life dealing with people I would never have a drink with, who I would never employ and who use me as a vehicle for their own self-promotion. There are a lot of great people in Ukip. The problem is that Ukip has become a bit like the other parties: people view it as a means to get elected."

"Let June 23 go down in our history as our independence day."

"Dare to dream that the dawn is breaking on an independent United Kingdom."

"We have fought against the multinationals, we have fought against the big merchant banks, we have fought against big politics, we have fought against lies, corruption and deceit, and today honesty, decency and belief in nation, I think now is going to win. And we will have done it without having to fight, without a single bullet being fired. We'd have done it by damned hard work on the ground."

"All of us in our lives go through ups and downs and I regret the down that I am in at the moment. But I make this plea, particularly to the media - please leave my wife and children alone. Don't hassle them, don't intimidate them. They don't deserve it and it's simply not fair."

"The very idea of Tommy Robinson being at the centre of the Brexit debate is too awful to contemplate. And so, with a heavy heart, and after all my years of devotion to the party, I am leaving Ukip today. There is a huge space for a Brexit party in British politics, but it won't be filled by Ukip."

"I got a phone call a couple of months ago to say 'we are closing your accounts', I asked 'why', no reason was given. I was told a letter would come which will explain everything, the letter came through and simply said 'we are closing your accounts, we want to finish it all by a date', which is around about now. I didn't quite know what to make of it, I complained, I emailed the chairman, a lackey phoned me to say that it was a commercial decision, which I have to say, I don't believe for a single moment. So I thought, well there we are, I'll have to go and find a different bank, I've been to seven banks, asked them all 'could I have a personal and a business account?', and the answer has been no in every single case. There is nothing irregular or unusual about what I do, the payments that go in and come out every month are pretty much the same, I maintain in my business account quite a big positive cash balance, which I guess with interest rates where they are is pretty good for the bank too."

"There's not much point in having a United Kingdom if we're governed from somewhere else. We may as well become a satellite state of the European Union because that's virtually what we are. Our courts aren't supreme. Our parliaments aren't supreme, whether that's in Holyrood or in Westminster. This is not about Scotland's relationship with Westminster. This is about whether Scotland wants to be part of an independent UK."

"A couple of times I've been stuck on the motorway and surrounded by swarms of potential migrants to Britain and once, even, they tried the back door of the car to see whether they could get in."

"In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it."