Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.

Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time.

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

The underlying assumption that human nature is basically the same at all times, everywhere, and obeys eternal laws beyond human control, is a conception that only a handful of bold thinkers have dared to question.