Libertarianism Quotes

Philosophically, I believe that libertarianism - and the wider creed of sound individualism of which libertarianism is a part - must rest on absolutism and deny relativism. ~ Murray Rothbard

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way. ~ Robert Frost

We wish to break with all aspects of the liberal State: with its welfare and its warfare, its monopoly privileges and its egalitarianism, its repression of victimless crimes whether personal or economic. Only we offer technology without technocracy, growth without pollution, liberty without chaos, law without tyranny, the defense of property rights in one's person and in one's material possessions. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

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

Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal ~ Murray N. Rothbard

If almost everyone is in favor of feeding the hungry, the politician may find it in his interest to do so. But, under those circumstances, the politician is unnecessary: some kind soul will give the hungry man a meal anyway. If the great majority is against the hungry man, some kind soul among the minority still may feed him - the politician will not. ~ David D. Friedman

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

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

Libertarianism and communism are equally crazy in opposite ways. Libertarians believe that it is possible to privatize everything without anarchy, while communists believe that it is possible to socialize everything without tyranny. ~ Michael Lind

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

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

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

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

Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" - not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Let's be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American Libertarianism. Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, 'Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness'? . . . I beg to differ. ~ Iain Banks

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

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

Theocracy is the destruction of human freedom in the name of God. Libertinism is the destruction of moral norms in the name of liberty. Neither will do. ~ Robert Sirico

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

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

They want to keep the government 'out of our bedrooms.' What are they talking about? I have to live in their society, remember. And I built my house, which means I built my own bedroom. The government told me how far apart the studs had to be in my bedroom wall, they dictated how thick the sheetrock had to be, they mandated how far apart the sheetrock screws had to be, they had policies on the configuration of those sheetrock screws, they have laws on the size of the windows and what kind of glass I can have in them, and there are stern legal warnings on the mattress tags. What do you mean, you want to keep the government out of our bedrooms? The president is probably contemplating, right this minute, the establishment of a bedroom czar. ~ Douglas Wilson

Many rabble-rousers for libertarianism, liberty and freedom are unwitting pawns of controllers they have never even considered. ~ Bryant McGill

[Libertarians] don't denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don't quibble over their coercers' credentials. If you can't pay or don't want to, you don't much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration. ~ Bob Black

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

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

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

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

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

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians. ~ George Orwell

Anarcho-capitalism is to "minimal statism" what a cure is to a painkiller. ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

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

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals - if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. ~ Ronald Reagan

Libertarianism is a theory of politics that is so compelling that once you have absorbed it, it becomes the lens through which you end up understanding all economic and political events. ~ Llewellyn Rockwell

Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government. ~ A.E. Samaan

In the end, there is no substitute for clear thinking, logic, and common sense.... A better path to enlightenment involves reading and thinking for yourself. ~ Ron Paul

The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of human liberty, which means the future of civilization. ~ Henry Hazlitt

Democratic Socialism is simply Totalitarianism that allows you the illusion of a voice in the matter. ~ A.E. Samaan

The notion that Google/ Alphabet has the potential to be a democratizing force is certainly laudable, but the contradictions inherent in its projects must be contextualized in the historical conditions that both create and are created by it. ~ Safiya Umoja Noble

If libertarianism were easy to explain, and it weren't easy to exaggerate the effects of libertarianism, I think it would have been done already. Many many very intelligent people have applied themselves to crafting an agenda that people could grab ahold of. But the problem of course is that libertarianism isn't political. It is kind of anti-political. It wants to take a lot of things out of the political arena. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

For libertarians, freedom entails the right of people to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful. For conservatives, freedom entails the right of government to do just about anything it wants, even if its conduct is violent. ~ Jacob G. Hornberger

There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for the crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have. ~ Harry S. Truman

Tax reform means, 'Don't tax you, don't tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.' ~ Russell B. Long

Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate. ~ Henry Hyde

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people. ~ Adam Smith

In libertarianism the aim isn't judging better from best, it's making sure that there is freedom for the perpetual revolution of ideas. It too opposes custom, tradition, the authority of winnowed wisdom, and our moral heritage that is our inheritance and defends only that which serves its purpose; utility and efficiency are its trumps and those cannot be conserved but rather only aimed at. Libertarianism is thereby tolerant of all behavior that seems not to damage others because its strongest belief is that no truth but freedom itself has been settled. ~ Darrin Moore

With a [democratic] government anyone in principle can become a member of the ruling class or even the supreme power. The distinction between the rulers and the ruled as well as the class consciousness of the ruled become blurred. The illusion even arises that the distinction no longer exists: that with a public government no one is ruled by anyone, but everyone instead rules himself. Accordingly, public resistance against government power is systematically weakened. While exploitation and expropriation before might have appeared plainly oppressive and evil to the public, they seem much less so, mankind being what it is, once anyone may freely enter the ranks of those who are at the receiving end. Consequently, [exploitation will increase], whether openly in the form of higher taxes or discretely as increased governmental money "creation" (inflation) or legislative regulation. ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

When democratic governments create economic calamity, free markets get the blame. ~ Jack Kemp

For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behaviour is called...policy. ~ Thomas King

Individual liberty may be unable to solve every social problem, but collective violence is unable to solve any social problem. ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation. ~ Frederic Bastiat

The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority ... It is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people. ~ Frank I. Cobb

Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does. ~ James Carriger Paine

Incidentally, the same logic that would force one to accept the idea of the production of security by private business as economically the best solution to the problem of consumer satisfaction also forces one, so far as moral-ideological positions are concerned, to abandon the political theory of classical liberalism and take the small but nevertheless decisive step (from there) to the theory of libertarianism, or private property anarchism. Classical liberalism, with Ludwig von Mises as its foremost representative in the twentieth century, advocates a social system based on the nonaggression principle. And this is also what libertarianism advocates. But classical liberalism then wants to have this principle enforced by a monopolistic agency (the government, the state) - an organization, that is, which is not exclusively dependent on voluntary, contractual support by the consumers of its respective services, but instead has the right to unilaterally determine its own income, i.e., the taxes to be imposed on consumers in order to do its job in the area of security production. Now, however plausible this might sound, it should be clear that it is inconsistent. Either the principle of nonaggression is valid, in which case the state as a privileged monopolist is immoral, or business built on and around aggression - the use of force and of noncontractual means of acquiring resources - is valid, in which case one must toss out the first theory. It is impossible to sustain both cont ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

In order to be the master, the politician poses as the servant. ~ Charles De Gaulle

Legislating morality grows big government immensely, and helps fashion the noose the government will use to ultimately hang you by. ~ A.E. Samaan

While the feds ... leave Social Security off their books, the government's obligation to make benefit payments to current and near-term Social Security recipients is certainly no less real than its obligation to pay interest on its Treasury bonds. ~ Laurence Kotlikoff

I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Existing political philosophies all developed before evolutionary game theory, so they do not take equilibrium selection into account. Socialism pretends that individuals are not selfish sexual competitors, so it ignores equilibria altogether. Conservatism pretends that there is only one possible equilibrium - a nostalgic version of the status quo - that society could play. Libertarianism ignores the possibility of equilibrium selection at the level of rational social discourse, and assumes that decentralized market dynamics will magically lead to equilibria that yield the highest aggregate social benefits. Far from being a scientific front for a particular set of political views, modern evolutionary psychology makes most standard views look simplistic and unimaginitive. ~ Geoffrey Miller

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law ... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts. ~ H.L. Mencken

The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom - these are the pillars of society. ~ Henrik Ibsen

Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from. ~ Thomas Sowell

The opposite of Nazi is neither Republican nor Democrat, conservative or liberal. Totalitarianism's diametric opposite of is Libertarianism. ~ A.E. Samaan

If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day - doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents - it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of "independents" and "moderates" may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort i ~ William E. Connolly

The goal of libertarianism is not to permit people to be free, but to make them realize that they don't need anyone's permission to be free. ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

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

MAN: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly? There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist - because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority. ~ Noam Chomsky

The cost of government control is human liberty, prosperity, and dignity. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

[The] term 'libertarian' itself, to be sure, raises a problem, notably, the specious identification of an anti-authoritarian ideology with a straggling movement for 'pure capitalism' and 'free trade.' This movement never created the word: it appropriated it from the anarchist movement of the [nineteenth] century. And it should be recovered by those anti-authoritarians ... who try to speak for dominated people as a whole, not for personal egotists who identify freedom with entrepreneurship and profit. ~ Murray Bookchin

A libertarian is someone who graduated from thinking that there are problems with the state to realizing that the state is the problem. ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United Statesis off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist - because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority. If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract" - but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice - it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.
The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though - nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax" - but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.
Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard [Am ~ Noam Chomsky

A tyranny based on ... deception and maintained by terror must inevitably perish from the poison it generates within itself. ~ Albert Einstein

Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune. ~ Milton Friedman

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. ~ Frederic Bastiat

This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible. ~ Herbert Spencer

For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more. ~ Gore Vidal

The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it. ~ Harry Browne

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit. ~ Samuel Gompers

The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless. ~ James Dale Davidson

Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions. ~ Milton Friedman

The policy of the American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Libertarianism is "cultish," say the sophisticates. Of course, there's nothing cultish at all about allegiance to the state, with its flags, its songs, its mass murders, its little children saluting and paying homage to pictures of their dear leaders on the wall, etc. ~ Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Socialists make the mistake of confusing individual worth with success. They believe you cannot allow people to succeed in case those who fail feel worthless. ~ Kenneth Baker

No nation was ever ruined by trade. ~ Benjamin Franklin

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make man agree to his own destruction. ~ Janet Frame

Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race. ~ Clarence Thomas

All Socialism is Democratic Socialism. Socialist nations take away civil liberties by referendum. ~ A.E. Samaan

If you ruin your life, you will pay the price of rehabilitating yourself ... We are not punished for our sins, but by them. Liberty means responsibility. ~ Mike Cloud

I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights. ~ Clarence Thomas