Libertarian Quotations

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.

In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

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

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

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

Libertarians regard the state as the Supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public. All states everywhere, whether democratic, dictatorial, or monarchical, whether red, white, blue or brown.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

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.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

A Libertarian society of unfettered individualism spreads its benefits to virtually everyone - not just those who have the resources to seize political power.

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.

The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.

Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.

You have to be careful as a libertarian because you can sound very Republican.

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism ...

Beloved friends and comrades... the national Libertarian Party is dead.

A tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government.

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.

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.

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.

We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every ten minutes.

The State calls its own violence, law; but that of the individual, crime

I believe in libertarian options because they allow an interesting management of the capital and are based on co-operation, reciprocity, contract, federation.

The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.

Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.

Legitimate use of violence can only be that which is required in self-defense.

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

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.

You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants.

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

A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

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

You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.

All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals.

I am a Libertarian Republican in the Goldwater style.

I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.

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

You can only be free if I am free.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.

The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.

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

I've voted Libertarian as long as I can remember, but I don't really remember much before the Clintons and the Bushes. Those clans made a lot of us bugnutty.

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.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.

Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal - because I'm an idealist.

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

I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

I think libertarians need somebody who can articulate getting from A to Z. But you know, if G is achievable, how about it? Let's get there!

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

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

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

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.

We are not punished for our sins, but by them.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.

The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.

Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

Perpetual war for perpetual peace

To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all laws into contempt.

He who regulates everything by laws, is more likely to arouse vices than reform them.

Libertarians should say, 'I love this country too much to take away votes from the Republican'

The program of classical liberalism, condensed into a single word, would have to read: property.

The vigorous man industriously striving for the improvement of his condition acts neither more nor less than the lethargic man who sluggishly takes things as they come. For to do nothing and to be idle are also action, they too determine the course of events.

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.

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.

Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.

I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.

Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.

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

The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our history abundantly attest.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.

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

In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.