CUFOA

Canadian Unlicensed Firearms Owners Association
Association canadienne des propriétaires d’armes sans permis

Quotations

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"All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared to the totality of knowledge which is constantly utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant."

F. A. Hayek
The Constitution of Liberty
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1960
p. 30


"Liberty is a system under which all government action is guided by principles, but it is an ideal that which will not be preserved unless it is itself accepted as an overriding principle governing all particular acts of legislation. Where no such fundamental rule is stubbornly adhered to as an ultimate ideal about which there must no compromise for the sake of material advantage - as an ideal which, even though it may have to be temporarily infringed during a passing emergency, must form the basis of all permanent arrangements - freedom is almost certain to be destroyed by piecemeal encroachment. For in each particular instance it will be possible to promise concrete and tangible advantages as the result of the curtailment of freedom, while the benefits sacrificed will in their nature always be unknown and uncertain."

F. A. Hayek
The Constitution of Liberty
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1960
p. 68


"It is sheer illusion to think than when certain needs of the citizen have become the exclusive concern of a single bureaucratic machine, democratic control of that machine can effectively guard the liberty of the citizen. So far as the preservation of personal liberty is concerned, the division of labor between a legislature which merely says that this or that should be done and an administrative apparatus which is given exclusive power to carry out these instructions is the most dangerous arrangement possible. All experience confirms ... 'that the zeal of the administrative agencies to see their function out of focus and to assume that the constitutional limitations and guaranteed individual rights must give way before their zealous efforts to achieve what they see see paramount purpose of government.'"

-F. A. Hayek
The Constitution of Liberty
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1960
pp. 261 - 262
and quoting Roscoe Pound
the Rise of the Service State and Its Consequences
in The Welfare State and the National Welfare, ed. S. Glueck,
Cambridge, mass, 1952 p. 220


"The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life [where] far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes."

Pericles general of Athens, 461 to 429 BC,
quoted by Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Crawley trans., ii, 37
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1960 p. 164