Best 728 quotes in «libertarian quotes» category

I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.

I expect to see trade wars, foreign policy disasters, a few race riots, a decrease in personal liberty, higher taxes, higher inflation and probably, economic collapse. The silver lining is, secession will probably become more feasible.

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

If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.

If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.

If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.

If our country is to survive and prosper, we must summon the courage to condemn and reject the liberal agenda, and we had better do it soon.

[If Republicans] got to put their kids into public school. They got to take public health. They would become libertarian faster than you could say Ayn Rand.

If there's anything a public servant hates to do it's something for the public.

If we have learned anything in the past quarter century, it is that we cannot Federalize Virtue.

If you feel driven to feed the poor, get your checkbook out and keep your tyrannical mouth shut about it.

I hear Republicans and Libertarians and so forth talking about property rights, but they stop talking about property rights as soon as the subject of American Indians comes up, because they know fully well, perhaps not in a fully articulated, conscious form, but they know fully well that the basis for the very system of endeavor and enterprise and profitability to which they are committed and devoted accrues on the basis of theft of the resources of someone else. They are in possession of stolen property. They know it. They all know it. It's a dishonest endeavor from day one.

I have been a libertarian in my past but now I consider myself a classical liberal.

I have said many times in the past I don't choose to be vice president, either Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or vegetarian.

I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

I let go of all desire for the common good, and the good becomes as common as the grass.

I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.

I'm a Libertarian. I'm liberty, justice for all, liberty for all.

I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association.

I'm an atheist. I suppose you can call me a sort of libertarian anarchist. I regard religion with fear and suspicion. It's not enough to say that I don't believe in God. I actually regard the system as distressing: I am offended by some of the things said in the Bible and the Qur'an and I refute them.

I'm always looking for an opportunity to bring progressive Democrats together with some conservative libertarian types, because there are places where we can agree.

I'm not sitting in judgment on whether or not libertarians can participate in a political process whose very nature they oppose.

I'm not a complete libertarian. There is a proper role in some areas of the government to have rules and regulations - I'm not an anarchist.

I mean, this is a group [Republicans], don't forget, that gave its presidential straw ballot to Ron Paul, Ron Paul, and Rand Paul and Rand Paul. So, they have abandoned what - their libertarian values and instincts to embrace [Donald] Trump.

I'm not a knee-jerk conservative. I passionately believe in free markets and less government, but not to the point of being a libertarian.

I’m not into the whole Austrian type, strongly libertarian economics. I like more mainstream economics.

In a modern democracy, not only can a libertarian be elitist; a libertarian has to be elitist. To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right.

In Madison's famous formulation in the Federalist, constitutional restrictions on government assume that we "first enable the government to control the governed." If the public authorities can be outgunned or bribed, the vibrancy of the private sector can be pathological.

In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.

In government, the scum rises to the top.

Individuality is the aim of political liberty.

I never thought I was a libertarian until I picked up Reason magazine and realized I agree with everything they had printed.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

In philosophical terms, the opposite of rationalism is not irrationalism but empiricism, that is, a willingness to form beliefs on the basis of experience rather than from a priori deduction. Empirical evidence never yields the dogmatic certainty that accompanies logical deduction.

Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insincerity and mendacity.

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.

I oppose registration for the draft... because I believe the security of freedom can best be achieved by security through freedom.

I really didn't know much about the Libertarians. I knew they were for less government and more individual freedom. I liked that.

I think a lot of voters have certain cognitive dissidence. Donald Trump is getting social conservatives, economic conservatives, some Libertarian, some supply side conservatives, debt hawks. The conservative and Republican base is not monolithic. It has subsets that he seems to be appealing to all of them.

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.

It ain't so much what a man doesn't know that causes him so many problems, but what he knows that ain't so.

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

It became quite clear to me that the Natural Law mystique, in Catholic, libertarian or neo-pagan forms, remains basically a set of rhetorical strategies to hypnotize others into the state which Bernard Shaw called "barbarism" and defined as 'the belief that the laws of one's own tribe are the laws of the universe'.

I think I realized that Dave Barry was funnier than I'll ever be, and he made no attempt to make any actual points. He had a general libertarian point of view, but in general, he just liked to make jokes.

It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.

It is easier for a libertarian to attack the science of global warming than to alter one's core libertarian beliefs.

It is a reality attested by all history that if a republic assumes imperial functions it will not remain a republic.

It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.

It is dissent from government policies which defines the true Patriot