Liberty Notes from Larry Reed (1)

Updating the "Liberty Notes from Larry Reed", taken from Lawrence/Larry's facebook wall statu in 2012.

Larry is the President of the Foundation for Economic Education (www.fee.org), a big free market think in the US. He used to be the President of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (www.mackinac.org), also a free market think tank based in Midlands, Michigan. He moved to FEE to do a bigger job in promoting liberty across America and the rest of the world as Mackinac is concerned more with policy issues in Michigan.

I first met him in Michigan when I attended the Mackinac Leadership Conference in mid-April 2004, when I was given an international fellows scholarship by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (www.atlasnetwork.org) in the US. It was a one month training, exposure and meetings with many free market leaders in the US and other parts of the world. It was also my first trip to the US :-)

With Larry and some batchmates during the Mackinac Leadership Conference.

Below are quotes from various thinkers that Larry posted in his fb wall in January 2012. I did not include wall posts with links.

I will post more liberty notes and quotes from him in this blog in the coming days and weeks. Meanwhile, enjoy these erudite ideas (and some funny quotes) from him and from various thinkers in the past.
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"Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?" -- Robert Orben.

"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; now I'm beginning to believe it" -- Clarence Darrow.

"We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: 'I can’t fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about.' Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility--blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty" -- Marvin Cooley.

"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage" -- H. L. Mencken.

"It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong" -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all" -- Frederic Bastiat, author of "The Law."