Best 728 quotes in «libertarian quotes» category

Look not to the politicians; look to yourselves.

Make us your slaves, but feed us.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

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.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance.

Methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim.

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

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.

Modern Anarcho-Syndicalism is a direct continuation of those social aspirations which took shape in the bosom of the First International and which were best understood and most strongly held by the libertarian wing of the great workers' alliance.

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

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.

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

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

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size.

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.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

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.

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

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

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.

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

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.

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

Petty laws breed great crimes.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Perpetual war for perpetual peace.

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.

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

Politicians, like bombers, seldom see their victims.

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

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.

Poverty is the greatest cause of terrorism.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats.

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