Libertarian Quotations

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I want to gag sometimes when I see who "we" are recommending that people vote for, and not just as a libertarian.

It is easier for a libertarian to attack the science of global warming than to alter one's core libertarian beliefs.

To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst.

Political correctness is tyranny with manners.

I have been a libertarian in my past but now I consider myself a classical liberal.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.

The plans differ; the planners are all alike...

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

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.

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

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

The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible "mixed economy," thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists.

Perpetual war for perpetual peace

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Libertarian Party is a shameful party

Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

The cure for evil and disorder is more liberty, not suppression.

The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop.

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

I never thought I was a libertarian until I picked up Reason magazine and realized I agree with everything they had printed.

Libertarians are conservatives who still get high.

What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.

Development cannot really be so centered only on those in power.

Opportunity could be defined in so many ways. There's one way of defining it, equality of opportunity, which is in fact the equality of capability, but the libertarians got there first and they have - like the Americans getting onto the moon, naming every crater after something like an astronaut - they have got there and named "opportunity" in a way that we cannot get ownership of now.