"Various authorities have been trying to force a Social Security number on me. They telephone and tell me I MUST have one; since I have none, they are giving me one. I tell them I won’t have it. I get forms, my humble request to be entitled to Social Security benefits; with command, Sign here and return to—I put them in the wastebasket. I get orders to appear at such an hour, such a date, at such an office, with all records and receipts to show cause—I reply that it is not convenient for me to appear—etc., etc. I even get an order to appear and support with documents my claim for refund of the tax‐and‐fine that I paid; I return this, writing across it, I have made no such claim. The telephone rings, and I am informed that I am being given the necessary Social Security number; I say I have none and I shall NOT have one; I will have nothing to do with that Ponzi fraud because it is treason; it will wreck this country as it wrecked Germany; I won’t have it; you can’t make me."

“American farmers fought the ‘protective tariff’ from 1800 to 1896 … Even as late as 1933, when Garet Garrett and I drove all over the Midwest, the farmers in general were not wanting AAA or any other federal interference. In Kansas I met a rabble‐rousing New Dealer from Washington who took me to a farmers’ meeting where he spoke with real conviction and eloquence. The audience listened absolutely noncommittal, until he worked up to an incandescent peroration: ‘We went down there to Washington and got you all a Ford. Now we’re going to get you a Cadillac!’ The temperature suddenly fell below freezing; the silent antagonism was colder than zero. That ended the speech; the whole audience rose and went out. The orator later said to me, ‘Those damned numbskulls! The only thing to use on them is a club!’”

“In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically, from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America over. The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.”

“As to the restraint of trade by business, that is impossible; the notion that money is power is another lie. There is no possible means by which the duPont Company can stop me from starting an enterprise that will eventually totally destroy the duPont Company. I can be stopped only by violence, by physical force. The duPont Company, desiring to stop me, has two possible methods: You can hire and pay a gunman to kill me or kidnap me, and gangsters to destroy my property; you cannot do this successfully if the State performs its proper function of protecting human rights . Or, you can bribe enough Congressmen to pass an Act of Congress setting up a commission and requiring that anyone engaging in any enterprise in the field of duPont Company’s activities must first obtain a permit from the commission and thereafter be ‘regulated’ by the members of the commission.”

“Chattel slavery really was an interesting illustration of this fact. The slavery-owners were in process of destroying their own economy by maintaining slavery. That’s why they could not win a military victory over the northerners. ‘Natural resources’ were more abundant in the south than in the north, but wealth was progressively less in comparison because slavery inhibited the use of human energy in the south. So the southerner was hampering the use of his own liberty by suppressing the slave’s use of his. The increasingly indebted slave-owner on his increasingly mortgaged property was unable to do much that he wanted to do, and the reason for his diminishing area of freedom was his denial of freedom to his slaves.”

“Freedom is not a permission granted by any Authority. Freedom is a fact. Whether or not this fact is known, freedom is in the nature of every living person, as gravitation is in the nature of this planet. Life is energy; liberty is the individual control of human life-energy. It can not be separated from life. Liberty is inalienable; as I can not transfer my life to anyone else, I can not transfer my liberty, my control of my life-energy, to anyone else.”

“No jailer can compel any prisoner to speak or act against that prisoner's will, but chains can prevent his acting, and a gag can prevent his speaking.”