Libertarianism Quotes

When, thirty-five years ago, I tried to give a summary of the ideas and principles of that social philosophy that was once known under the name of liberalism, I did not indulge in the vain hope that my account would prevent the impending catastrophes to which the policies adopted by the European nations were manifestly leading. All I wanted to achieve was to offer to the small minority of thoughtful people an opportunity to learn something about the aims of classical liberalism and its achievements and thus to pave the way for a resurrection of the spirit of freedom after the coming debacle.

Ludwig von Mises

More dangerous than bayonets and cannon are the weapons of the mind.

Ludwig von Mises

[Judith Warner:] Our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothering can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we’ve stopped trying to do on a society-wide one.

Emily Matchar

It's freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences and/or ridicule.

A.E. Samaan

Liberty is not something a government gives you. It is a right that no government can legally take away.

A.E. Samaan

Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.

A.E. Samaan

When libertarian sentiments take a populist form, it looks like this: a mix of anger, fear, anti-intellectualism, and fierce government hostility. Welcome to the Tea Party movement.

David Niose

When you vote, you play Russian Roulette with a magazine fed pistol.

Tom Wallace

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

Mikhail Bakunin

Defy the central planners. Upend their designs for your life. Be a staunch individualist. Stand on your rights.

A.E. Samaan

Socialists eat their children. The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once statists come into power. Statists abhor free thinking.

A.E. Samaan

Let's be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American Libertarianism. Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, 'Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness'? . . . I beg to differ.

Iain Banks

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Christopher Hitchens

Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods ... What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?

Pyotr Kropotkin

One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over...

Murray N. Rothbard

American Progressives have declared war on the sanctity and autonomy of the individual.

A.E. Samaan

…The story of the Pledge of Allegiance and its National Socialist roots is a fascinating one. Dr. Rex Curry, a passionate libertarian, has made the issue his white whale.

Jonah Goldberg

Abolitionism was a movement to end private slavery. Libertarianism is a movement to end private and public slavery.

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

The 20th Century proved that there is nothing more dangerous to the health of ethnic minority communities than big government.

A.E. Samaan

Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts.

Ludwig von Mises

Even Adam Smith's "invisible hand" occasionally needs a slap on the wrist.

Bill Mech

The theories of the social sciences do not consist of “laws” in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts.

Friedrich A. Hayek

Libertarians are not supposed to be egalitarians… And yet there it is: egalitarianism has become the unspoken but very real driving force in the current Official movement. Once group egalitarianism becomes the norm, other groups than blacks will clamor for the privileges of ‘victim status.’ Sure enough, that jostling for victim privilege is now the major hallmark of American politics.The Official libertarians have so far not displayed enormous affinity for Latino or disabled ‘rights,’ but they are highly enthusiastic about the ‘rights’ of women and feminism generally. And in particular, libertarians have displayed great fervor for gay ‘rights’ and stress the evils of ‘discrimination’ against gays. So ardently are libertarians devoted to gay rights that the word ‘libertarian’ in the public press has now become almost a code word for champion of gay rights.Only his pro-gay agenda accounts for the ardor of Republican libertarians toward Massachusetts Governor Weld, whom they embrace as, in the current slogan, ‘fiscally conservative but socially tolerant.’ (The ‘fiscally conservative’ refers to a one-time budget cut followed, the next time around, by a compensatory budget increase.) ’Socially tolerant,’ in the current atmosphere, means a devotion to the entire Left cultural agenda, from gay rights to compulsory multicultural propaganda and condomization in the public schools.

Murray N. Rothbard

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.

David Graeber

There is a lot of talk about "rigged games" as of late. Big government is the most insipid of all "rigged games". There is no choice available to the public allowing it to avoid a big over-arching government. You can always chose not do business with a big corporation. Corporations that are distasteful can be avoided. A big, powerful, government bent on intrusion cannot be avoided.

A.E. Samaan

Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights.

A.E. Samaan

Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is but one thing only: Buy Low - Sell High. Capitalism is what happens when a government allows free association and respects property rights. It is a symptom of liberty.

A.E. Samaan

They would tell you that governments could not manage things as economically as private individuals; they would repeat and repeat that, and think they were saying something! They could not see that “economical” management by masters meant simply that they, the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid less!They were wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible; and they were taking an interest in the process, were anxious lest it should not be done thoroughly enough! Was it not honestly a trial to listen to an argument such as that?And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six o’clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to take his clothes off; who had never had a week’s vacation in his life, had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything, never hoped anything—and when you started to tell him about Socialism he would sniff and say, “I’m not interested in that—I’m an individualist!” And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was “paternalism,” and that if it ever had its way the world would stop progressing.It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out—for how many millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was!And they really thought that it was “individualism” for tens of thousands of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run it to suit themselves, and build their own libraries—that would have been “Paternalism”!

Upton Sinclair

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

Robert Frost

The real American ideal of cool which is building businesses, protecting freedom at home and abroad, taking responsibility for your actions, and leaving other people alone to live as they damn well please.

Greg Gutfeld

All Socialism is Democratic Socialism. Socialist nations take away civil liberties by referendum.

A.E. Samaan

The idea economy is a conversation. Try to channel or control that conversation and you will stop the chatter.

A.E. Samaan

If a man loses his money through unwise market speculation or by playing the horses, he has been punished in a manner which we may call passive. By this I mean that another person has not taken special, socially overt steps to harm the "offender." This phenomenon has not received the attention it deserves.

Thomas Szasz

Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal

Murray N. Rothbard

A limited state with free economic systems is the soil where the liberty tree blossoms.

Orrin Woodward

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.

Frédéric Bastiat

Many rabble-rousers for libertarianism, liberty and freedom are unwitting pawns of controllers they have never even considered.

Bryant McGill

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.

Frédéric Bastiat

A libertarian is someone who graduated from thinking that there are problems with the state to realizing that the state is the problem.

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Modern Western democracies no longer engage in such despotic assaults on freedom, Instead, they deprive people of liberty indirectly, by relieving them of responsibility for their own (allegedly self-injurious) actions and calling the intervention "treatment.

Thomas Szasz

The goal of libertarianism is not to permit people to be free, but to make them realize that they don't need anyone's permission to be free.

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

To eliminate statism is not to physically subdue the rulers, but to mentally liberate the ruled.

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

You can get to oppression through regulation, especially in an "Idea Economy" which necessitates liberty of the mind to explore.

A.E. Samaan

Our Supreme Court is not a court of law. It is a court of conjecture and political fad.

A.E. Samaan

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private liberty.

A.E. Samaan

Communism is what happens when Socialists realize that they want complete control over every aspect of human life.

A.E. Samaan

The desire to engineer humanity is a sign of a mind warped by megalomania and lust for power.

A.E. Samaan

Big government = oligarchy. Simple equation. Big government = loss of representation.

A.E. Samaan

A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy.

A.E. Samaan

There is no law, there is only conjecture. The Progressive ethos changes the law's meaning according to fad and fashion.

A.E. Samaan

Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.

A.E. Samaan

Despots are elected and deposed.Laws are passed and repealed.Nations rise and fall.Individual liberty is eternal.

A.E. Samaan

Statism is political fashion.Individual liberty is eternal.

A.E. Samaan

Socialism is "group-think." How uninformed in history do you have to be to advocate for "group-think"??

A.E. Samaan

I think, therefore I am an individual... not a drone in a collective. I think, therefore I am... Libertarian

A.E. Samaan

Some that read this book will find its Libertarian and Constitutionalist slant a bit obtuse and maybe even off-putting. This author makes no apologies for viewing the history of the eugenics movement from this political perspective. It is the ethical and legal underpinnings of the American Revolution that remain as a guiding light while the eugenics movement continues to reemerge long after its alleged demise. Limited, or rather minimal government, goes a long way to curtail the disconnect that emerges when government grows so large that it no longer feels compelled to heed to the dictates of the governed.

A.E. Samaan

The sadist desires to command and control. The masochist desires to be freed from the burdens of liberty. That is Socialism.

A.E. Samaan

Thomas More's Utopia was not a recommendation. It was a warning.

A.E. Samaan

The U.S. didn't achieve its liberty or prosperity by mistake. It was by design, and the architects were the Founding Fathers. Don't mess with the Constitution. The Constitution matters.

A.E. Samaan

Very few tyrants argued for the slavery of the masses. Instead, they argued for their right to protect the people from themselves.

A.E. Samaan

1 2 3 Next

Libertarianism Quotes

Related Topics