Best 728 quotes in «libertarian quotes» category

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Anything called a "program" is unconstitutional.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior.

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

Civil libertarians have raised concerns that some of the Patriot Act's provisions infringe on Constitutional rights. Those concerns are not supported by the facts.

Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.

Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.

Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence.

Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.

Damn the Solar System. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better myself.

Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.

David and Charles Koch are pretty much as far right as you can get on the ideological spectrum without falling off. They are far right libertarians, very anti-government, very pro-business, very anti-tax, anti-regulatory, in favour of free markets ruling the day.

Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state.

Decriminalization would take the profit out of drugs and greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the drug-related violence that is currently plaguing our streets.

Democracy is indispensable to socialism.