Libertarian Quotes by William Shakespeare, David Limbaugh, Taylor Caldwell, Martin Niemoller, William J. H. Boetcker, William O. Douglas and many others.
There’s small choice in rotten apples.
Republicans are already on seriously thin ice, having presided over an era of unprecedented spending and consistently failing to articulate conservative principles on a wide variety of issues. But what Obama has in store will make President Bush appear, in retrospect, like a libertarian.
People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
There was no one left to speak for me.
You cannot build character and courage by destroying men’s initiative and independence.
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.
The idea of the Internet as sort of open and democratic and free and with no hierarchy, the libertarian beginnings as it were, with peer-to-peer networks… I’d sort of like for everyone to just admit that we’re beyond that now.
The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow though it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.
The gentle government that promises to hold your hand as you cross the street refuses to let go on the other side.
It does not matter whether you win or lose, what matters is whether I win or lose!
The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
Make us your slaves, but feed us.
Well, I’m a libertarian conservative, so I believe in limited government/maximum individual freedom.
We’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?
If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves
The average American family head will be forced to do twenty years’ labor to pay taxes in his or her lifetime.
I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.
Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion – the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals – the technique of the marketplace.
The truth was that all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.
If you tell most people what libertarians think, they immediately assume that you cannot mean it all the way, that you’re really just taking a position for argument’s sake.
There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.
Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do.
My opinion, having done this now for two cycles, is I think the national media really likes me and likes what I have to say. But, at the end of the day, ‘He’s a Libertarian,’ and that denotes some loose screws, maybe.
If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government’s ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.
When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.
When I was four years old they tried to test my IQ, they showed me this picture of three oranges and a pear. They asked me which one is different and does not belong; they taught me different was wrong.
The consumers suffer when the laws of the country prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from expanding the sphere of their activities. What made some enterprises develop into “big business” was precisely their success in filling best the demand of the masses.
What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.
Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated.
America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.
Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple stupid behavior.
The essential notion of a capitalist society … is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.
I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS.
Government has a monopoly on the legal use of force and violence.
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
We want to be inclusive. We want to have our shareholders, our employees, our customers, whether they are Democrat, Republican, Green or Libertarian, to feel comfortable with how we’re doing business. And so that tends to be apolitical. People say, ‘No, no, I just simply shouldn’t get involved in politics.’
The reason welfare is bad is not because it costs too much, nor because it “undermines the work ethic,” but because it is intrinsically at odds with the way human beings come to live satisfying lives.
You can’t reason people out of beliefs they weren’t reasoned into.
Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.
To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
… In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism – the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong.
At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.
Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.
At the end of the day, Democrats go out and appeal to 30 percent of the far left; Republicans go out and appeal to 30 percent of the far right. Hey, there’s a big middle ground here that’s not represented. I think that, Bill Weld and myself, I think the Libertarian Party really occupies that ground.
I want a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution.
Force always attracts men of low morality.
Libertarian: everyone leaves everyone else alone
Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
I’m as radical as libertarians come.
Form 1040 was chosen by the IRS because for every $50 you earn, you get 10 and they get 40.
Gun bans don’t disarm criminals, gun bans attract them.
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst.
Mrs. Bonneville never buckled her seat belt, even though it was required by state law; an ardent libertarian, she opposed government meddling in all matters of personal choice.
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insincerity and mendacity.
Laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt
The Libertarian position on the freedom of speech is a strong support of freedom of speech, and we oppose government intervention in controlling what is or is not moral.
A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property – an unpaid tax bill.
If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
We libertarians are not the spokesmen for any ethnic or economic class; we are the spokesmen for all classes, for all of the public; we strive to see all of these groups united, hand-in-hand, in opposition to the plundering and privileged minority that constitutes the rulers of the State.
Giving a politician access to your wallet is like giving a dog access to your refrigerator.
Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.
The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.
Lots of us have been plugging away, building a platform to talk about libertarian communism and post-scarcity economics.
… the next revolution … will be when those who work refuse to support those who don’t.
Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
Libertarians recognize the difference between adults and children, as well as differences between normal adults and adults who are insane or mentally hindered or retarded.
People fear witches, and burn women.
Talk is cheap – except when Congress does it.
I was brought up as a Republican. But when I realized that at the end of the day there wasn’t much difference between a Democrat and Republican, I became a libertarian.
. . . Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded. . . .
See, as a libertarian, I am actually far more liberal on the issue of immigration than many people might expect.
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses.
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
Perpetual war for perpetual peace.
Our government is an agency of delegated and strictly limited powers. Its founders did not look to its preservation by force; but the chain they wove to bind these States together was one of love and mutual good offices.
There’s no greater service to this country than the defense of its freedom.
If our country is to survive and prosper, we must summon the courage to condemn and reject the liberal agenda, and we had better do it soon.
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
Among the most serious allegations a federal court can address are that an Executive agency has targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views. No citizen – Republican or Democrat, Socialist or libertarian – should be targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those grounds.
Adam Smith’s key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit.
If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.
You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other’s throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace
When I called people and said, ‘Hey! Do you want to work for the president?’ they usually said yes. I had 2 people say no. One person said no because they were a Republican; one person said no because they’re a Libertarian.
Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.
It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
My reason for arguing against abolishing these types of sports isn’t some kind of lofty, philosophical rationale. It’s just that I did it and I liked it. It comes down to a libertarian issue for me. I feel that if I know the risks and I want to take them, I should be allowed to do so.
“Gun Control” isn’t about guns. It’s about control. If guns are outlawed, how can we shoot the liberals?
The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.
The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society.
The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom-they are the pillars of society.
Individuality is the aim of political liberty.
I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
Nations are not ruined by one act of violence, but gradually and in an almost imperceptible manner by the depreciation of their circulating currency, through its excessive quantity.
That’s the first sign you know you’re a Libertarian. You see the red light. You stop. You realize that there’s not a car in sight. And you put your foot on the gas.
Libertarians love their children at least as much as the Democrats and the Republicans, probably more.
Talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication.
If even one new drug of the stature of penicillin or digitalis has been unjustifiably banished to a company’s back shelf because of exceedingly stringent regulatory requirements, that event will have harmed more people than all the toxicity that has occurred in the history of modern drug development.
The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature.
Government does not grow by seizing our freedoms, but by assuming our responsibilities.
Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.
The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.
An Old World revolution is only a movement around a motionless center; it never breaks out of the circle. Firm in the center is belief in Authority.
The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets.
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of human liberty, which means the future of civilization.
Ask a fellow if he favors organized prayer in the public schools. If he says ‘No’ he’s a liberal. If he says ‘Yes’ he’s a conservative. If he says, ‘Public schools? The Constitution grants the government no power to run any mandatory tax-funded youth propaganda camps,’ you have your hands on the wily libertarian.
Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats.
Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.
Government, in it’s last analysis, is organized force.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.
The great object is that every man be armed.
It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors.
Among the cancers devouring the American body politic, one of the most virulent involves liberals who play the race card as carelessly as children playing 52 Pickup.
Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free.
All of political history history can be summed up as a struggle to throw the bad guys out and put the good guys in.
The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
Look not to the politicians; look to yourselves.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.
Patriotism means loving our country, not the government.
Good intentions will always be pleaded, for every assumption of power; but they cannot justify it … It is hardly too strong to say, that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intention, real or pretended.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
And quit bringing up our forefathers and saying they were civil libertarians. Our founding fathers would have never tolerated any of this crap. For God’s sake, they were blowing peoples’ heads off because they put a tax on their breakfast beverage. And it wasn’t even coffee.
If you live in a country run by committee, be on the committee.
Even the most Bush-happy, flag suckling jack-arse knows deep-down inside that something is wrong. America is over and everyone knows it. The New World Order has a dying empire odor and changing the channel ain’t going to make this go away.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.
What I was really saying in ‘The Examined Life’ was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before.
Western civilization is based upon the libertarian principle, and all its achievements are the results of the action of free men.
Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government)
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Im a registered independent with a lot of libertarian leanings.
Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand. They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens.
My parents both defected from communist Hungary and were what most people would today call libertarian. I grew up with a general distaste for taxation and any policy that intruded on our lives.
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
A tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government.
My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility
Need’ now means wanting someone else’s money. ‘Greed’ means wanting to keep your own. ‘Compassion’ is when a politician arranges the transfer.
It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
In our desire to have government become our benefactor and sustainer, we have allowed it to become our taskmaster and overlord. As a result, we have become little more than well-fed, well-entertained slaves to the state. Freedom, as envisioned by our forefathers, is gone.
For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade.
Let me tell you how it will be. There’s one for you, nineteen for me. Cause I’m the taxman.
That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.
In every State, the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces.
A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.
A classic liberal is more like a libertarian. I’m sorry. Classic liberal, actually, from the 1800s has a totally different meaning than a liberal who is [modern] classic.
The myth of the inevitability of economic globalization is based largely on the work of Milton Friedman, and easily the most underreported story of our time is that the current economy proves Friedman flatly wrong.
This country is a one-party country. Half of it is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn’t make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians.
Politics is the means by which the will of the few becomes the will of the many.
Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
Information technology alone cannot provide us an absolute shield against its evil twin disinformation technology. Our only protection is law, and that protection is available to us only if legitimate governments have the power to govern.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.
People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
I want to gag sometimes when I see who “we” are recommending that people vote for, and not just as a libertarian.
The public school system: “Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.”
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.
I’m a Libertarian. I’m liberty, justice for all, liberty for all.
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
The angels and the devils are definitely within us, not within the machines we use.
There is no use in deceiving ourselves. American public opinion rejects the market economy, the capitalistic free enterprise system that provided the nation with the highest standard of living ever attained. Full government control of all activities of the individual is virtually the goal of both national parties.
The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.
The society exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society.
Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.
Washington…has become an alien city-state that rules America, and much of the rest of the world, in the way that Rome ruled the Roman Empire.
This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.
To entrust the government with the power of determining the education which our children receive is entrusting our servant with the power to be our master.
The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.
The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity.
The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
Maybe that’s because guns are sold at a profit, while schools are provided by the government.
However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.
Vote for me. I’ll use my office to take another American’s money and give it to you.
A policy of subsidizing failures will end in an economy strewn with capital-guzzling industries long past their time of profitability – old companies that cannot create jobs themselves, but can stand in the way of job creation.
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind.
No man has ever ruled other men for their own good.
Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.
Political reform need not go hand in hand with economicВ liberalization.. I hold unconventional views about this.. I do not believe if you are a libertarian, full of diverse opinions, full of competing ideas in the market place, full of sound and fury, therefore you will succeed.
Remember, to them it is us who are the enemy.
[If Republicans] got to put their kids into public school. They got to take public health. They would become libertarian faster than you could say Ayn Rand.
I just think it is important that you realize, that you’re the best in the world. Whether you are a Democrat or Republican or whether you’re libertarian or whatever, you are the best. And we should not ever forget that. And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go.
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
If the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds … its policies would most definitely reflect the вЂlegitimate concerns’ of children to have вЂadequate’ and вЂequal’ access to вЂfree’ french fries, lemonade and videos.
The best government is the least government. In some areas, I’m libertarian. I don’t subscribe to any one party; they are all bad.
To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin”.
My eldest son you know, in his short life so far, he’s experimented with Corbynism, Communism, Brexit. He’s now Welsh nationalist and libertarian.
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
Public Schools too often fail because they are shielded from the very force that improves performance and sparks innovation in nearly every other human enterprise – competition.
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
I don’t have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun. Change your thoughts and you change your world.
Even great spirits have only their five-fingers’ breadth of experience – just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.
Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression.
Imagine a libertarian president challenging Congress for meaningful immigration reform.
What…can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.
We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every ten minutes.
I have no quarrel with libertarians who advance the concept of capitalism . I believe that people will decide for themselves what they want to do. The all-important thing is that they be free to make that decision and that they do not stand in the way of communities that wish to make other decisions.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
Which is better: to achieve Nirvana, or become a Boddhissatva?
It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.
Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.
ONLY a government that is AFRAID of its citizens tries to control them.
We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt ends — the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.
I am a socially liberal libertarian who is not for open borders.
With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.
Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature, as if we’re some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It’s a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy. Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits.
I’m furious about the Women’s Liberationists. They keep getting up on soap-boxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket.
Do not ever say that the desire to ‘do good’ by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics.
Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
The most destructive thing governments do is divide people against each other, all in competition over the reins of the state.
There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation.
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
We are not punished for our sins, but by them.
A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ’20s and ’30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.
I am perfectly happy to compromise and work with anybody. Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians. I’ll work with Martians. If — and the if is critical — they’re willing to cut spending and reduce the debt.
Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I’m an idealist.
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
The proverb warns that ‘You should not bite the hand that feeds you.’ But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
The Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.
I’m a bit of a Libertarian.
We protest solemnly in the face of mankind, that we desire peace at any sacrifice, save that of honor.
Wherever politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by saying what people like to hear rather than what is demonstrably true. Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insi
Tax reform means, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.”
The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.
To work for libertarianism – to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual – used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
We like to imagine that in history, truth will prevail through sheer persuasive power. Sadly, this is not the case. Truth needs champions.
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.
In levying taxes and in shearing sheep, it is well to stop when you get down to the skin.
The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
There’s a very comfortable techno-libertarian culture where you think you’re doing the right thing.
Like many people, most Libertarians feel empathy and sympathy for less fortunate people. But they know you can’t have perfection in a world of limited resources.
There is a word sweeter than mother, home or heaven. That word is liberty.
They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.
In government, the scum rises to the top.
I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.
There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no libertarians in financial crises.
A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.
But I’m hopeful some of that will start to change. The public is more libertarian, the public is saying we want people who are going to be independent and not bow to leadership in either of the major parties.
Libertarians argue that no normal adult has the right to impose choices on other normal adults, except in abnormal circumstances, such as when one person finds another unconscious and administers medical assistance or calls an ambulance.
Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.
Every day, IRS agents levy liens on homes, bank accounts, and businesses; they confiscate cars, furniture, boats, and other personal property without the constitutional protections of due notice, hearing, and due process. If a person forcibly resists, government agents kill him for resisting arrest.
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.
The laissez-faire argument relies on the same tacit appeal to perfection as does communism.
Libertarianism and communism are equally crazy in opposite ways. Libertarians believe that it is possible to privatize everything without anarchy, while communists believe that it is possible to socialize everything without tyranny.
When there is money in your hand and not in your heart, it will not harm you even if it is a lot; and when it is in your heart, it will harm you even if there is none in your hands.
It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law…that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
Nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom.
Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
I’m not sitting in judgment on whether or not libertarians can participate in a political process whose very nature they oppose.
Gravity. It’s not just a good idea; it’s the law!
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
Conservatism is constitutionally opposed to public reason, and this explains the abandon with which so many conservative pundits embrace flagrant simulations of reason, constructed through the methods of public relations, and exhibit so little regard for the real thing.
If the Tenth Amendment were still taken seriously, most of the federal government’s present activities would not exist. That’s why no one in Washington ever mentions it.
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
Trying to be a socialist and a libertarian is obviously a very difficult balancing act, which nobody has pulled off too successfully in this century.
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
The proper direction of man’s thought is not toward the creation of new laws for government, but toward the acceptance of every person’s moral dignity.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
I believe that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other men’s rights.
The American experiment has come and gone. Whatever freedoms the people still might have as their own, are monitored and registered and taxed at virtually every turn.
I am more of a constitutionalist libertarian.
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
Those (who) seek to establish systems of Government based on the regimentation of all Human Beings by a handful of individual rulers…call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.
It is dissent from government policies which defines the true Patriot
Whether you’re a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal, the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring to public life.
Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.
Those who attack the rationale of the game, and not the players, are its most formidable adversaries.
We own ourselves. This is the core of a libertarian theory of rights. But on this theory, while we are at liberty to kill ourselves (regardless of the consequences of others), we are not allowed to kill others, not even if this means that there we be fewer murders in the future, totally speaking.
The degree of a country’s freedom is the degree of its prosperity.
I am a libertarian with a small “l” and a Republican with a capital “R”. And I am a Republican with a capital “R” on grounds of expediency, not on principle.
I can spend your money better than you can.
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.
The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.
The illegal drug trade is the financial engine that fuels many terrorist organizations around the world, including Osama bin Laden.
Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange.
Politicians never accuse you of ‘greed’ for wanting other people’s money – only for wanting to keep your own money.
Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers.
Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence.
Let not his mode of raising cash seem strange,
Although he fleeced the flags of every nation,
For into a prime minister but change
His title, and ’tis nothing but taxation.
Although he fleeced the flags of every nation,
For into a prime minister but change
His title, and ’tis nothing but taxation.
Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.
Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
Liberty, Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order.
I’ve appeared on InfoWars many times, and I’ve never heard ‘hate speech.’ InfoWars has libertarian and conservative-leaning views.
… often analysis seems to be based on the assumption that future economic output is almost entirely determined by inexorable economic forces independently of government policy so that devoting more resources to one use inevitably detracts from availability for another.
I think, it was like 30 million dollars the Libertarians talk about that it cost them to get on the ballot. We don’t have 30 million dollars. We’re a people powered campaign.
Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
Politicians need human misery. … Government’s a disease masquerading as its own cure.
The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.
A caged canary is safe but not free.
As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.
An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
There’s a certain libertarian right-wing view that there should be no FDA, that people can decide for themselves whether medicines are safe and effective. That’s nonsense. Most people don’t have the expertise or the resources to mount a proper study to find out whether a treatment is safe or effective.
The history of the Internet is not, as some people have tried to make it, a libertarian just-so story. It is a messy tale in which the government played a significant role. That role was, however, far more subtle than the plans of industrial policy gurus or techno-boosting politicians.
I am unable to accept the idea that I should be an obedient subject of a gang of corrupt, unprincipled thugs who pontificate about freedom while enslaving the population.
But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.
Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.
‘Tis true that governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit everyone who enjoys a share of protection should pay out of his estate his proportion of the maintenance of it.
What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.
Theories of “natural law” and the “law of nations” are another excellent example of discussions destitute of all exactness. […] “Natural law” is simply that law of which the person using the phrase approves[….]
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
Libertarians are believers in small government who really mean it — no excuses, no exceptions. [For Libertarians], the excesses of government are their best recruiters.
War is just one more big government program.
I have been a libertarian in my past but now I consider myself a classical liberal.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.
A protective tariff is a typical conspiracy in restraint of trade.
Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.
The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom…
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.
Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.
Reddit has attracted a lefty, libertarian audience since the beginning.
The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
My current novel, Pallas, is all about that culture war – in fact it’s been called the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Sagebrush Rebellion – and yet what I hear all too often from libertarians is that they don’t read fiction.
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Some of the bitcoin community come from that kind of anarchistic, libertarian view. But, one reason why I think Ripple has been very successful is because we work with the system.
The public firm can nowhere maintain itself in free competition with the private firm; it is possible today only where it has a monopoly that excludes competition. Even that alone is evidence of its lesser economic productivity.
A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren
Don’t steal – the government hates competition!
I don’t agree with the libertarians. I want my security first. I’ll deal with all the details after that.
For every new mouth to feed, there are two hands to produce.
Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, capable not only of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting 100 impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.
To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.
Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one’s fellow man … that’s what competition is all about: “outpleasing” your competitors to win over the consumers.
Freedom is still the most radical idea of all.
Libertarians know that a free country has nothing to fear from anyone coming in or going out – while a welfare state is scared to death of poor people coming in and rich people getting out.
All religions must be tolerated for every man must get to heaven in his own way.
Conservatives want to be your daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do. Liberals want to be your mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose. Libertarians want to treat you as an adult.
There are many farm handouts; but let’s call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, “Vote for me. I’ll use my office to take another American’s money and give it to you.”
By going on the defensive. […] libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from “polite” company.
Everything government touches turns to crap.
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
What we should have fought for was representation without taxation.
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
What I would like to vote for is a candidate that is socially liberal, a fiscal conservative, broadly libertarian with a small ‘l’ but sensible and pragmatic and with a chance of winning. That’s more or less the empty set.
Don’t tax you, don’t tax me;
Tax the companies across the sea.
Tax the companies across the sea.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
I have said many times in the past I don’t choose to be vice president, either Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or vegetarian.
If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.
Liberty consists in doing what one desires.
Do not consider Collectivists as “sincere but deluded idealists”. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not “idealistic,” no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.
Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.
Government failure is always used as an excuse for government expansion. Government thrives on crisis and incompetence.
There comes a time when a moral man can’t obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.
To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.
In order to get the power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities which are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, cruelty.
After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.
Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.
Communism is like one big phone company.
Libertarians are conservatives who still get high.
The cure for evil and disorder is more liberty, not suppression.
Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.
The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it continues until it destroys.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
I think Tierney is also more libertarian than he is conservative in the conventional sense.
As you may have heard, the U.S. is putting together a constitution for Iraq. Why don’t we just give them ours? Think about it – it was written by very smart people, it’s served us well for over two hundred years, and besides, we’re not using it anymore.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more.
It’s nice to have a lot of people in the field. Independent, third party, Libertarian, Reform and other party candidates can do what they want to do. I welcome them to the race.
When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.
So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves.
For those looking for security, be forewarned that there’s nothing more insecure than a political promise.
Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
I am a passionate civil libertarian.
Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior.
In order for an act to be a crime, libertarians say, someone must be harmed – there must be a victim. Anything that’s peaceful, voluntary, and honest should be tolerated regardless of whether we agree with it. Part of the price of our own freedom is allowing others to be free.
It’s no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of duty.
Together, the property rights and public choice schools show only that, if you start by assuming a purely individualistic model of human behavior and treat politics as if it were a pale imitation of the market, democracy will, indeed, make no sense.
Men in Government monopolize the necessary use of force; they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use.
I do have an intense respect for pacifists, because I believe that ultimately, if we are to have a truly humanistic as well as libertarian society, violence will have to be banished on this planet.
Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.
An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.
He who controls the past controls the future.
The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism.
To describe Peter Thiel as simply a libertarian wildly understates the case. His belief system is based on unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism.
I stated that I’m a libertarian Republican, which means I believe in a series of issues, such as smaller government, constraint on budget deficits, free markets, globalization, and a whole series of other things, including welfare reform.
Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.
People still have a choice, but, if they find it all too confusing, or they just want someone else to make a choice for them, there’s a default that works pretty well. That’s this concept of libertarian paternalism. And it’s handy.
Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.
A traffic jam is a collision between free enterprise and socialism. Free enterprise produces automobiles faster than socialism can build roads and road capacity.
One of the things that makes me a conservative, or a libertarian, or whatever the heck it is that I am – a person who doesn’t much like big government – is that I do not like the concentration of the power.
Libertarians believe consenting adults have the right to do whatever they choose, except band together.
Certainly the emphasis I place in this chapter on coordination of behavior and cooperation to mutual benefit is something that ought to be very congenial to people in the libertarian tradition.
An armed society is a polite society.
We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.
The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.
There is a common perception that there are two alternative libertarian positions on immigration: government-controlled borders and open borders. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is only one libertarian position on immigration, and that position is open immigration or open borders.
A tyrant… is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
Public schools are government-established, politician- and bureaucrat-controlled, fully politicized, taxpayer-supported, authoritarian socialist institutions. In fact, the public-school system is one of the purest examples of socialism existing in America.
Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn’t even get out of committee.
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose – that it may violate property instead of protecting it – then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.
My instincts are conservative, but my inclinations are also libertarian.
Truth and news are not the same thing.
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
No good libertarian I know wants us to completely isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. It’s not even possible. I mean there are economic ties – there are trade routes that need to be secured. You know international trade can’t happen if you don’t have open oceans.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
Take not from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
If we do not halt this steady process of building commissions and regulatory bodies and the special legislation like huge inverted pyramids over every one of the simple constitutional provisions, we shall soon be spending many billions of dollars more.
People who object to weapons aren’t abolishing violence, they’re begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically ‘right.’ Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.
The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it’s so rare.
Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.
Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.
And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works
There’s always someone telling you not to do something. The main thing is just to ignore them.
With respect to the words “general welfare,” I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
I’m basically a libertarian, and I’m a conservative on economic matters, and I’m a social liberal.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
Libertarians regard the state as the Supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public. All states everywhere, whether democratic, dictatorial, or monarchical, whether red, white, blue or brown.
All socialism involves slavery.
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
War is the Health of the State.
Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.
All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living.
We are a one party country. Half of them call themselves Democrats and the other half call themselves Republicans. All the good ideas come from the Libertarians.
There’s never been a good government.
If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools.
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
A [tax loophole is] something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform.
Libertarian immigration policy would be an experiment in which I don’t think we should participate. We should not bet the republic that the results will be good. I suspect the results would be a disaster and the end of the American experiment.
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
Not only can no one predict the future, we don’t understand the present – and there isn’t even any certainty about the past.
The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.
If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man, then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.
Anything called a “program” is unconstitutional.
The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
It is commonly believed that the rights of the American people come from the Constitution. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Rather suffer an injustice than commit one.
It is easier for a political party to attain national ballot status in Russia today than it is for the Libertarian party or the Green party to get on the ballot in, say, Pennsylvania.
Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized.
The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes–will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.
Methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim.
When politicians say “I’m in politics,” it may or may not be possible to trust them, but when they say, “I’m in public service,” you know you should flee.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
It must never be unpatriotic to support your country against your government. It must always be unpatriotic to support your government against your country.
The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, “See if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk”.
Most of the presidential candidates’ economic packages involve ‘tax breaks,’ which is when the government, amid great fanfare, generously decides not to take quite so much of your income. In other words, these candidates are trying to buy your votes with your own money.
The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.
The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible “mixed economy,” thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists.
Our country’s founders cherished liberty, not democracy.
As a libertarian I believe we should have a federal government simple and circumscribed enough to be run by an average, dull, normal American. With George W. Bush we have half the equation in place.
No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
Why don’t we have libertarian anarchy? Why does government exist? The answer implicit in previous chapters is that government as a whole exists because most people believe it is necessary.
When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government.
It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
The Libertarian Party holds that same-sex marriages are an individual issue and that the government has no right to determine with whom a person should have a relationship.
A country that goes out of its way to imprison the innocent has no business preaching democracy to the world.
The average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth… It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty – and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
The Koch brothers tend to give to right-leaning and libertarian causes. Koch money was instrumental, for example, in founding the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party.
Reduced employment opportunities is one effect of minimum wage legislation. The minimum wage law has imposed incalculable harm on the disadvantaged members of our society. The only moral thing to do is to repeal it.
The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone.
Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns – they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.
A libertarian presidential candidate isn’t going to win anyway, so he can afford to say that all taxation is theft, and it isn’t the job of a libertarian presidential candidate to cook up new ways to commit theft.
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Political correctness is tyranny with manners.
The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency.
The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.
I still think what the consumers are looking for is, number one, entertainment. They want to be entertained. It can be a liberal, a libertarian, or a conservative. It can be far-left or far-right. If they are entertained, they are going to tune in.
The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the “best” sources.
Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people.
The Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
Over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And LIBERTARIANS had more of it. Because what I really believe is, let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone.
The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest “functionaire” possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.
When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen’s constitutional right to free speech, it acts lawlessly; and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.
I’d like to see a Republican Party that embraces a lot of the libertarian ideas.
Sometimes just being still is the best thing you can do for yourself.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
I have sworn upon the altar of god.
The proper and limited use of government is to invoke a common justice and keep the peace – and that is all.
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true.
No nation was ever drunk when wine was cheap.
In a modern democracy, not only can a libertarian be elitist; a libertarian has to be elitist. To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right.
