Libertarian Quotes

That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone. (to Horatio Gates, 1798) ~ Thomas Jefferson

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. ~ Gore Vidal

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves. ~ William Ellery Channing

I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring. ~ Albert Jay Nock

Service is the rent we pay for the life we have been given. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Jed McCaleb, meanwhile, openly chastised fellow Bitcoiners for their emphasis on the "libertarian, going to replace all other currencies, take over the world stuff." "That just turns people off," he said. "The only important thing for people to know is that it is better than what people use now for online payments. ~ Nathaniel Popper

The chances of your being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The chance of your being robbed by your own government? That's easy: 100 per cent. ~ Joseph Sobran

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

The idea of the Internet as sort of open and democratic and free and with no hierarchy, the libertarian beginnings as it were, with peer-to-peer networks ... I'd sort of like for everyone to just admit that we're beyond that now. ~ Beeban Kidron

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. ~ H.L. Mencken

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax. ~ Eric Hoffer

Eugenics has always been the escape valve of single payer socialized medicine. Havelock Ellis was writing about them as one and the same prior to the fin-de-siecle. Culling out of control population growth and the economic drain of the incurably sick has always been a part of socialized medicine. ~ A.E. Samaan

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it. ~ Thomas Sowell

I would like to be interpreted as a liberal libertarian, like leave everybody alone and let them do their own thing. ~ Clint Eastwood

Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty. ~ Calvin Coolidge

Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others. ~ William Allen White

I think my degrees in Theology and Psychology qualified me for nothing, but probably prepared me for everything. ~ Brooke Bida

Political scientists and professors are the new clergy; the clergy of oppression. ~ A.E. Samaan

If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as "social gains", if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as "selfish greed". ~ Ayn Rand

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them. ~ George Santayana

Equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny. ~ Charles Forbes Rene De Montalembert

What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Our government, taxes, and ideas of freedom are already duplicates of the Old World. Our politicians determine how we should live our lives - and our individual liberties are sacrificed for the benefit of the Fatherland. ~ Harry Browne

God has given to men all that is necessary for them to accomplish their destinies. He has provided a social form as well as a human form. And these social organs of humans are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away, then, with the quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!
And, now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works. ~ Frederic Bastiat

Government seems to operate on the principle that if even one individual is incapable of using his freedom competently, no one can be allowed to be free. ~ Harry Browne

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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. ~ Emma Thompson

I will represent all of the people of Ohio, regardless of their background. I don't care if you are a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian or a vegetarian, I will be blind to race, religion or any kind of orientation. ~ Josh Mandel

Do Libertarians care about the poor? Well, we're not ladening them down with debt, we're not sending them off to God damned wars, we're not creating a permanent underclass, we're not trapping them in shitty schools where they graduate unable to read, WE DO CARE ABOUT THE POOR, and that's why we want the State out of their way!! ~ Stefan Molyneux

The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

So, I'm a playwright. In Minneapolis. Which means that I find myself operating in a pretty lefty crowd, most of the time. And most of my energy goes towards arguing with that, and musing about how I really fucking can't stand Democrats. So I was startled to be reminded of a fact that I'd almost entirely forgotten: I really fucking can't stand Republicans. ~ Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action, Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable. ~ Noam Chomsky

Rights are something made up by governments to make you feel like you're buying something with your taxes. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Western civilization is based upon the libertarian principle, and all its achievements are the results of the action of free men. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more. ~ Allan H. Meltzer

When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

[Tomas] Jefferson is more out of fashion, both because of his views on race, where he's properly questioned, that part of his legacy, but also because the libertarian critique of bigness in business and government, the idea that size is a danger is something that's shared on the right when it comes to government and on the left when it comes to corporations, but not both. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something. ~ John Wayne

The public firm can nowhere maintain itself in free competition with the private firm; it is possible today only where it has a monopoly that excludes competition. Even that alone is evidence of its lesser economic productivity. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I am a Libertarian Republican in the Goldwater style. ~ Roger Stone

A tax loophole is something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform. ~ Russell B. Long

What ... can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way. ~ Murray Rothbard

See, I'm a great believer in the power of negative thought. And in an age of affirmation, of self-help and self-love, of the rebirth of wide-eyed idealism and the power of positive thinking - I'm happy to be a champion of skepticism and doubt. That night, I rediscovered my role, my reason, and my rage. ~ Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

Anywhere in the world, in every oppressive country, time sooner or later comes and libertarian people sing the same song: Goodbye Mr Dictator! This is a universal law, this is a universal song. ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The right to "liberty" and "pursuit" of happiness is incompatible with a government that makes choices for you. ~ A.E. Samaan

In fact, I should say to begin with that the term anarchism is quite a range of political ideas, but I would prefer to think of it as the libertarian left, and from that point of view anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of say Bakunin and Kropotkin and others. They had in mind a highly organized form of society, but a society that was organized on the basis of organic units, organic communities. And generally they meant by that the workplace and the neighborhood, and from those two basic units there could derive through federal arrangements a highly integrated kind of social organization, which might be national or even international in scope. And the decisions could be made over a substantial range, but by delegates who are always part of the organic community from which they come, to which they return and in which, in fact, they live. ~ Noam Chomsky

There's no greater service to this country than the defense of its freedom. ~ Barry Goldwater

America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation. ~ Henry Steele Commager

When I'm asked where libertarians fit on the left-right spectrum, I say we don't. We're above the line. ~ Marshall Fritz

I am not interested in having freedom from burdens.
I don't need any authority to free me from responsibility.
I am not interested in having freedoms within an authoritarian's parameters.
I am only interested in self-determination.
I have only respect for liberty as I am a libertarian. ~ A.E. Samaan

The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government. ~ Joseph Sobran

Libertarians typically argue that particular obligations, at least under normal circumstances, must be created by consent; they cannot be unilaterally imposed by others. ~ Tom G. Palmer

If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves. ~ Thomas Sowell

The Jacksonians were libertarians, plain and simple. Their program and ideology were libertarian; they strongly favored free enterprise and free markets, but they just as strongly opposed special subsidies and monopoly privileges conveyed by government to business or to any other group. ~ Murray Rothbard

Make government the herder of the flock, and the herder will cull the undesirable sheep. ~ A.E. Samaan

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron. ~ Peter Thiel

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force. ~ Adolf Hitler

Libertarians recognize the inevitable pluralism of the modern world and for that reason assert that individual liberty is at least part of the common good. ~ Tom G. Palmer

A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about. ~ Woodrow Wilson

Perpetual war for perpetual peace ~ Charles A. Beard

Tolstoy to Gandhi to Martin Luther King to Me and You ~ Brooke Bida

We are a one party country. Half of them call themselves Democrats and the other half call themselves Republicans. All the good ideas come from the Libertarians. ~ Hugh Downs

'Tis true that governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit everyone who enjoys a share of protection should pay out of his estate his proportion of the maintenance of it. ~ John Locke

Some libertarians succeed by re-inventing the wheel. Most libertarians fail by re-inventing the flat tire. ~ Mike Cloud

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

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

If you personally advocate that I be caged if I don't pay for whatever "government" things YOU want, please don't pretend to be tolerant, or non-violent, or enlightened, or compassionate. Don't pretend you believe in "live and let live," and don't pretend you want peace, freedom or harmony. It's a simple truism that the only people in the world who are willing to "live and let live" are voluntaryists. So you can either PRETEND to care about and respect your fellow man while continuing to advocate widespread authoritarian violence, or you can embrace the concepts of self-ownership and peaceful coexistence, and become an anarchist. ~ Larken Rose

Not in government or force, not in slavery or war, but in the creative, and thereby spiritual, power of freedom, shall our inspiration be found. ~ F. A. Harper

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats. ~ Thomas Sowell

The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great skepticism - which foretells a coming change.

As soon as skepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except increasing its power, and so can only survive on propaganda, which relies on unquestioning faith. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do. ~ Benjamin Barber

Despots are elected and deposed.
Laws are passed and repealed.
Nations rise and fall.
Individual liberty is eternal. ~ A.E. Samaan

The average family pays more in taxes than it spends on food, clothing, and shelter combined. ~ Dick Armey

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom. ~ Charles Peguy

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. ~ Plato

Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand. They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Change your thoughts and you change your world. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

It is no more the function of government to impose a moral code than to impose a religious code. And for the same reason. ~ Robert Morrison MacIver

"Gun Control" isn't about guns. It's about control. If guns are outlawed, how can we shoot the liberals? ~ Mike Gunn

I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes. ~ Clarence Thomas

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the winds may blow through it, the storm may enter, the rain may enter; but the king of England cannot enter. ~ William Pitt, 1st Earl Of Chatham

I don't know that the Libertarian Party has an official position on the separation of church and state. ~ Michael Badnarik

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all. ~ Jacob G. Hornberger

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. ~ H.L. Mencken

Man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual's capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

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. ~ Nicolaus Copernicus

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. ~ John Stuart Mill

Every single figure on Mount Rushmore was a third party at one time or another, so third parties become major parties, and I think that the Libertarian Party may become my major party. ~ Gary Johnson

I just think it is important that you realize, that you're the best in the world. Whether you are a Democrat or Republican or whether you're libertarian or whatever, you are the best. And we should not ever forget that. And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go. ~ Clint Eastwood

Maureen O'Brien's Bakery Lingo: A Partial Glossary
• 9 donuts - A shutout
• 2 croissants - A full moon
• 3 croissants - A ménage à trois
• 4 bear claws - Full smokey
• 2 bear claws - Half smokey
• The last one of any item - The gift of the Magi
• A baker's dozen of doughnut holes - a PG-13
• Anything in the unlikely quantity of 36 or a lot of something - A Wu-Tang
• Blueberry muffin - Chubby Checker
• Bran muffin - Warren G the regulator
• Any customer who left no tip - A libertarian
• Any customer who only tipped the coins from their change - A couch shaker
• Any person who requested a substitution - Master and demander
• Any person who requested TWO substitutions - Demander in chief
• Any person who requested MORE than two substitutions - The new executive chef

and finally....

• Any vegan customer - A Morrissey ~ J. Ryan Stradal

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation – "It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?"

Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined ~ Frederic Bastiat

A politician who commends himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to do good with other peoples' money. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times. ~ Lawrence W. Reed

We tried to change Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam changed us. ~ Tony Thomson

Political reform need not go hand in hand with economic liberalization.. I hold unconventional views about this.. I do not believe if you are a libertarian, full of diverse opinions, full of competing ideas in the market place, full of sound and fury, therefore you will succeed. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Government failure is always used as an excuse for government expansion. Government thrives on crisis and incompetence. ~ Jim Babka

The Constitution: it's not just a good idea, it's the law. ~ Michael Badnarik