Libertarian Quotes - Page 4

It's illegal to forcefully take money from people unless you're the government. It's illegal to take someone's liberty, unless you're the government. It's illegal to kill someone, unless you're the government. Private organizations can do everything that government can do except for legally break the law.
J.S.B. Morse
The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great skepticism - which foretells a coming change.As soon as skepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except increasing its power, and so can only survive on propaganda, which relies on unquestioning faith.
Stefan Molyneux
Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?
Frédéric Bastiat
To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano.
Henry Hazlitt
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.
Thomas Sowell
The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
Ludwig von Mises
If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.
Ludwig von Mises
No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a state-managed society.
Jeffrey Tucker
Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.
Murray N. Rothbard
Private property is redundant. "Public property" is an oxymoron. All legit property is private. If property isn't private it's stolen.
Gustave de Molinari
You cannot have an agency that defends your property, which also has the right to violate your property rights at will. That's like hiring a bodyguard that you pay to beat you up randomly.
Stefan Molyneux
It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it, and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.
Albert Jay Nock
Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep.
Stefan Molyneux
The libertarian philosophy doesn't explain the best way to grow a vegetable garden!" Why do some people talk as if there should be one concept or principle which is all you'll ever need to know in order to handle everything in life? Right now the PRIMARY threat to humanity--by a factor of a zillion--is the belief in "authority." And the solution--the ONLY solution--is for people to escape that superstition. Questions like, "But how do we care for the poor?" are 100% logically IRRELEVANT to proving that statism is immoral and destructive. "But gee, if I stop sawing off my toes with this steak knife, how will I balance my checkbook?" Why the hell do people imagine that anarchists have some obligation to explain how every aspect of everyone's life will work, just because they say, "Having a ruling class is immoral and irrational"? When someone tells you to stop advocating evil crap (e.g., statism), they don't suddenly acquire an obligation to explain the whole universe to you, or to guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to anyone ever again.
Larken Rose
Statism is an unnatural disaster.
Stefan Molyneux
Rights" are something made up by governments to make you feel like you're buying something with your taxes.
Stefan Molyneux
History is the same story with different costumes.
Stefan Molyneux
The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.
Isabel Paterson
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. &It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of protecting themselves by arms and be so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion.
Aristotle
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.
Albert Camus
Ever wonder why the media never refers to 18 or 19 year old American soldiers as "armed teens"?
Stefan Molyneux
My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul....I was wrong to follow the meanness of Conservatism. I should have been trying to help people instead of taking advantage of them. I don't hate anyone anymore. For the first time in my life I don't hate somebody. I have nothing but good feelings toward people. I've found Jesus Christ – It's that simple. He's made a difference. (Reagan's campaign manager "death-bed confession" in Feb. 1991 article for Life Magazine )
Lee Atwater
Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.
Aristotle
In his 1907 retirement address, Joseph Pulitzer urged his successors to always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
Joseph Pulitzer
No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.
Ludwig von Mises
A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
Leonard Bernstein
A free and prosperous society has no fear of anyone entering it. But a welfare state is scared to death of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out.
Harry Browne
That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone. (to Horatio Gates, 1798)
Thomas Jefferson
We've got this weird dysgenic situation where we're basically just paying idiots to breed and taxing intelligent people to stay away from each other with anything remotely resembling fertility.
Stefan Molyneux
When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist. Dom Helder Camara – one of the great prophets of Christian "Liberation theology".
Dom Helder Camara Archbishop of Recife in Brazil
The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life – the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.
Hubert H. Humphrey
The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense...When, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.
Frédéric Bastiat
The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.
Eric Hoffer
As mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.
President George Washington
It is be­cause freedom means the renun­ciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
Friedrich A. Hayek
The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this--that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.
Lysander Spooner
A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.
Ayn Rand
The demoralization that the debase­ment of the currency left in its wake played a major role in bring­ing Adolf Hitler into power in 1933.
Henry Hazlitt
No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire.
Lysander Spooner
I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.
Albert Jay Nock
The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude.
Daniel Hannan
They who employ force by proxy are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it themselves.
Herbert Spencer
In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.
Albert Jay Nock
Statism ends with an eye roll.
Stefan Molyneux
Having a Constitutional political party is a little like telling a car-jacker, "You're not allowed to do what you're doing! And if you don't stop it right now, we are going to ask you to order yourself to be nice! And if that doesn't work, we are going to try to elect a new car-jacker, who we hope will tell himself not to steal our cars! ... But at least we're not like those silly utopian anarchist kooks out there who refuse to work within the system for change! Those crazy people say there should be NO car-jackers at all!
Larken Rose
In the same way that central banking nearly wrecked the world and created one calamity after another, bitcoin can save the world one transaction at a time.It is time for a new beginning.
Jeffrey Tucker
…so that’s why I’m pleased to announce my endorsement of Sarah Palin for President in 2016: because you know that whoever gets elected is going to fuck you over. So why not vote for somebody that you actually want to get fucked by?
Phillip Andrew Bennett Low
It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.
Alexis de Tocqueville
What makes anyone think that government officials are even trying to protect us? A government is not analogous to a hired security guard. Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime. Yes, rulers have sometimes come to recognize the prudence of protecting the herd they are milking and even of improving its ‘infrastructure’ until the day they decide to slaughter the young bulls, but the idea that government officials seek to promote my interests or yours is little more than propaganda—unless, of course, you happen to belong to the class of privileged tax eaters who give significant support to the government and therefore receive in return a share of the loot.
Robert Higgs
The man who is not permitted to own is owned.
George Santayana
While liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar expressions of liberty in action.
Murray N. Rothbard
When the state itself is held to the same moral standards as everyone else, it dies. And that's a wonderful thing.
Jeffrey Tucker
I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.
Murray N. Rothbard
Where there is commerce there is peace.
Jeffrey Tucker
People are more willing to support the exercise of authority over themselves when they believe it to be an objective, neutral feature of the natural world. This was the idea behind the concept of the divine right of kings. By making the king appear to be an integral part of God's plan for the world rather than an ordinary human being dominating his fellows by brute force, the public could be more easily persuaded to bow to his authority. However, when the doctrine of divine right became discredited, a replacement was needed to ensure that the public did not view political authority as merely the exercise of naked power. That replacement is the concept of the rule of law.
John Hasnas
There are two and only two ways that any economy can be organized. One is by freedom and voluntary choice—the way of the market. The other is by force and dictation—the way of the State.
Murray N. Rothbard
The very term ‘public utility’ … is an absurd one. Every good is useful ‘to the public,’ and almost every good … may be considered ‘necessary.’ Any designation of a few industries as ‘public utilities’ is completely arbitrary and unjustified.
Murray N. Rothbard
Libertarians make no exceptions to the golden rule and provide no moral loophole, no double standard, for government. That is, libertarians believe that murder is murder and does not become sanctified by reasons of state if committed by the government. We believe that theft is theft and does not become legitimated because organized robbers call their theft "taxation." We believe that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing that act calls it "conscription." In short, the key to libertarian theory is that it makes no exceptions in its universal ethic for government.
Murray N. Rothbard
I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.
Frederick Douglass
Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Friedrich A. Hayek

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