Best 728 quotes in «libertarian quotes» category

My wife and I are both Libertarian; she was a Democrat and I was a Republican, and we both met in the middle somewhere.

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.

Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

Of all the tyrannies on human kind the worst is that which persecutes the mind.

Never trust anyone who calls himself a libertarian socialist. They're bound to be deeply confused, at best.

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.

No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than any [constitutional] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

No one doubts that pure libertarianism is simple, but that's just why it remains on the ideological fringe - because it boils down the most difficult questions in human affairs to a simple equation, a What Would the Market Do bumper sticker.

No one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.

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.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

Not only can no one predict the future, we don't understand the present - and there isn't even any certainty about the past.

Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.

ONLY a government that is AFRAID of its citizens tries to control them.

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.

One of the failings of ideologues is their inability to see that everyone else isn't necessarily an ideologue like them.

People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.

One of the great weaknesses of standard libertarian theory is that it tends to push too hard by elevating presumptions into absolutes.

Opportunity could be defined in so many ways. There's one way of defining it, equality of opportunity, which is in fact the equality of capability, but the libertarians got there first and they have - like the Americans getting onto the moon, naming every crater after something like an astronaut - they have got there and named "opportunity" in a way that we cannot get ownership of now.

Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.

Perpetual war for perpetual peace.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

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.

Politicians, like bombers, seldom see their victims.

Politics is the means by which the will of the few becomes the will of the many.

Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen.

Poverty is the greatest cause of terrorism.

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.

Private property ... is a Creature of Society, and is subject to the Calls of that Society, whenever its Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing, its contributors therefore to the public Exigencies are not to be considered a Benefit on the Public, entitling the Contributors to the Distinctions of Honor and Power, but as the Return of an Obligation previously received, or as payment for a just Debt.

Profit is a signal that valuable services are being rendered to people on a voluntary basis.

Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.

Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.

Rand`s [Paul] a libertarian. He has a view of the world that I don`t share. He said that we shouldn`t have any troops in Iraq. He agreed with Obama that was a disaster. When there was a chance to do something constructive about Syria with a no-fly zone, he said we don`t need one.

Remember, to them it is us who are the enemy.

Republicans ought to propose conservative answers to the concerns that are uppermost on most voters’ minds. The libertarian-populist method seems to be to start with the solutions and then to imagine that voters have the relevant concerns. And while many of the proposed solutions have great potential appeal to conservative voters, few would do much to expand their ranks.

Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats.

People ask me what I am politically and I've previously offered this equation: I became a conservative by being around liberals. And I became a libertarian after being around conservatives.

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.

Science, incidentally, not only ignores the question of indwelling 'essences' by looking instead at measurable relationships, but science also does not agree that knowledge is obtained through Rothbard's Medieval 'investigation by a reason,' i.e., by inventing definitions and then deducing what your definitions implicitly assumed.

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.

Small government is beautiful

Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized.

Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government)

Some libertarians succeed by re-inventing the wheel. Most libertarians fail by re-inventing the flat tire.

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.

That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

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