Best 728 quotes in «libertarian quotes» category

Where there is commerce there is peace.

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.

Why anarchy? Because anything less would be uncivilized.

Why should you desire to compel others; why should you seek to have power— that evil, bitter, mocking thing, which has been from of old, as it is today, the sorrow and curse of the world—over your fellow-men and fellow-women? Why should you desire to take from any man or woman their own will and intelligence, their free choice, their own self-guidance, their inalienable rights over themselves; why should you desire to make of them mere tools and instruments for your own advantage and interest; why should you desire to compel them to serve and follow your opinions instead of their own; why should you deny in them the soul—that suffers so deeply from all constraint—and treat them as a sheet of blank paper upon which you may write your own will and desires, of whatever kind they may happen to be? Who gave you the right, from where do you pretend to have received it, to degrade other men and women from their own true rank as human beings, taking from them their will, their conscience, and intelligence—in a word, all the best and highest part of their nature—turning them into mere empty worthless shells, mere shadows of the true man and women, mere counters in the game you are mad enough to play, and just because you are more numerous or stronger than they, to treat them as if they belonged not to themselves, but to you? Can you believe that good will ever come by morally and spiritually degrading your fellow-men? What happy and safe and permanent form of society can you hope to build on this pitiful plan of subjecting others, or being yourselves subjected by them?

Without anarchy, there would be chaos.

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

Yet basically, libertarians are for freedom and liberty for individuals, while recognizing that in order to be free we must also be protected. Your freedom to swing your arms ends at my nose.

Workers of the world unite???? How'bout.... Staunch individualists disperse!!!

You can either have individual liberty, or dependence on the government. One is designed to undo the other.

You cant have "equal opportunity" if you put your thumb on the scales in an effort to force equal results.

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.

You either limit the government, or you limit the scope of your life. Why is the government that precious to you in the first place?

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

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.

After each war there is a little less democracy left to save.

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.

A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property - an unpaid tax bill.

After the Volcker Fund collapsed, I got another grant from the Lilly Endowment to do a history of the U.S., which I worked on from 1962-66. The original idea was to take the regular facts and put a libertarian assessment on everything.

A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.

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.

A libertarian is someone who can believe that the police are no more than a gang of thugs without realizing that in the absence of police, thugs will gather into gangs.

All of us inevitably spend our lives evolving from an initial to a final stage of dependence. If we are fortunate enough to achieve power and relative independence along the way, it is a transient and passing glory.

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.

All socialism involves slavery.

America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation.

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.

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.

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.

Anything called a "program" is unconstitutional.

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

Armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

A protective tariff is a typical conspiracy in restraint of trade.

As Barbara Streisand discovered, adopting a militaristic posture against a tech-savvy mob of civil libertarians is not going to be of much help: Many of them run their own servers and blogs - and have thousands of friends on their social networks - so overzealous attempts to silence them only lead to wider dissemination of sensitive information.

At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.

A shoe that fits one person pinches another.

A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.

Because the state necessarily commits aggression, the consistent libertarian, in opposing aggression, is also an anarchist.

A traffic jam is a collision between free enterprise and socialism. Free enterprise produces automobiles faster than socialism can build roads and road capacity.

A vote is "wasted" when someone fails to vote their conscience.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.

But the stupidity which is common to all such "explanations" is, of course, simply that of proceeding as though the merits of a theory - such things as truth, or probability, or explanatory power - could not possibly be among the reasons for its currency.

But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.

By the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions.

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.

But the trouble is that he [Alan Greenspan] had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy.

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun. Change your thoughts and you change your world.