Libertarian Quotes

The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude...

Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you never met, and to take pride in accomplish...

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it...

Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those peo...

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and ...

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its m...

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they cre...

The profit of the one is the profit of the other.

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

There are two principles between which there can be no compromise—liberty and coercion.

Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does i...

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an acti...

The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.

The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, ...

Trade protection accumulates upon a single point the good which it effects, while the evil inflicted...

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son ha...

In the first place, it would efface from everybody’sconscience the distinction between justice and i...

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. A...

Monopoly is a market, or part of a market, reserved to the exclusive possession of one or more selle...

Liberty should be understood as freedom from the government, specifically, freedom from the initiati...

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.

Private property is redundant. "Public property" is an oxymoron. All legit property is private. If p...

War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security...

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In...

No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sen...

Conflict is not unavoidable. However, it is nonsensical to consider the institution of a state as a ...

A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, ...

In a covenant...among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private p...

There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The s...

Experience cannot beat logic, and interpretations of observational evidence which are not in line wi...

So what? Why should an a priori proof of the libertarian property theory make any difference? Why no...

The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.

A free and prosperous society has no fear of anyone entering it. But a welfare state is scared to de...

Government programs didn’t arise because the people demanded them or because the free market was una...

Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of soc...

The demoralization that the debase­ment of the currency left in its wake played a major role in brin...

To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like tr...

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, h...

They who employ force by proxy are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it the...

Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, bunglingly, at greater cost, and ...

The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.

Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls o...

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach ...

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

I was reading in the paper today that Congress wants to replace the dollar bill with a coin. They’ve...

The essential difference between rich societies and poor societies does not stem from any greater ef...

The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely d...

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, th...

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives... I never meant ...

In his 1907 retirement address, Joseph Pulitzer urged his successors to always oppose privileged cla...

It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exe...

Health care and education are too important NOT to be left to the free market.

The more laws and restrictions there are,The poorer people become....The more rules and regulations,...

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little hea...

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, a...

Every socialist is a disguised dictator.

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to th...

If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learn...

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not w...

Rhetorical bombast, music and song resound, banners wave, flowers and colors serve as symbols, and t...

The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization ...

It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor.

What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologie...

The valuations which result in determination of definite prices are different. Each party attaches a...

There is not the slightest analogy between playing games and the conduct of business within a market...

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it ...

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.

As regards the social apparatus of repression and coercion, the government, there cannot be any ques...

No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it ...

Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism an...

If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us ...

If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves...

The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this--that it is o...

If any man's money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his...

No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not d...

And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made e...

Service is the rent we pay for the life we have been given.

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule o...

Yet basically, libertarians are for freedom and liberty forindividuals, while recognizing that in or...

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be w...

I am a libertarian with a small 'l' and a Republican with a capital 'R'. And I am a Republican with ...

I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government...

Until recently, attempts to resolve the contradictions created by urbanization, centralization, bure...

Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, a...

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating th...

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it ...

A libertarian is somebody who believes, of course, in personal liberty. And liberty is a personal th...

The idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Govern...

It must be remembered that a vast majority of mankind’s history has been spent living under the rule...

When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the st...

Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, ...

I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.

No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many m...