Libertarian Quotes

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.

There is only one way to kill capitalism - by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.

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.

Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

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.

It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost.

The media has created this environment that is okay to say almost anything about somebody who is, you know, right of Jane Fonda. You know, if you are slightly conservative or even libertarian points of view, especially if you are persuasive and charismatic and funny and effective, you will get called the most appalling things.

The society exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society.

The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.

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.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

In government, the scum rises to the top.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

All socialism involves slavery.

Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.

War is organized murder, and nothing else.

Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.

The civil libertarians among us would rather defend the constitution than protect our nation's security.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

The power to tax is the power to destroy.

You don't need a treaty to have free trade.

Free men do not ask permission to bear arms

If a donkey bray at you, don't bray at him.

The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.

There's never been a good government.

All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals.

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.

To be governed ... is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated, numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, law-driven, preached at, spied upon, censured, checked, valued, enrolled - by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.

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.

There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

War is the Health of the State.

Politicians, like bombers, seldom see their victims.

Peter Kropotkin described Anarchism as the extreme left wing of socialism - a view with which I completely agree. One of my deepest concerns today is that the libertarian socialist core will be eroded by fashionable, post- modernist, spiritualist, mystic individualism.

Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more.

The era of resisting big government is never over.

The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.

Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression.

When I'm asked where libertarians fit on the left-right spectrum, I say we don't. We're above the line.

Dependence leads to subservience.

The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone.

The state operates in a legal vacuum. There exists no contract between the state and its citizens.