Best 728 quotes in «libertarian quotes» category

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.

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.

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.

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.

A shoe that fits one person pinches another.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Democracy is indispensable to socialism.

Democracy is the suggestion box for slaves.

Dependence leads to subservience.

Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

Don't tax you, don't tax me; Tax the companies across the sea.

Economics is sometimes associated with the study and defense of selfishness and material inequality, but it has an egalitarian and civil libertarian core that should be celebrated.

Economist Frederick Thayer has studied the history of our balanced-budget crusades and has come up with some depressing statistics. We have had six major depressions in our history (1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929); all six of them followed sustained periods of reducing the national debt. We have had almost chronic deficits since the 1930s, and there has been no depression since then - the longest crash-free period in our history.

For every new mouth to feed, there are two hands to produce.

Even those who identify themselves as libertarians follow an overtly anti-rationalist philosophy, as even a brief acquaintance with the work of Friedrich Hayek should make clear. The argument against reason in this literature is straightforward: it is impossible for any individual to acquire enough reliable information to make a rational decision, any actions founded on rational thought will therefore be delusional, any attempts at reason should therefore regarded as dangerous, and all action should instead be guided by tradition.

Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles.

Fascism isn't a libertarian doctrine! It just isn't, never will be and it can't be cast as one.

Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression.