Murray Rothbard Quotations | Page 2

The man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, ‘Limit yourself’; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.

It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost.

We libertarians are not the spokesmen for any ethnic or economic class; we are the spokesmen for all classes, for all of the public; we strive to see all of these groups united, hand-in-hand, in opposition to the plundering and privileged minority that constitutes the rulers of the State.

The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress.

[W]hich category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely? [T]hose against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.

The fundamental axiom, then, for the study of man is the existence of individual consciousness

Positivism eliminates any kind of natural law principle - for example, that there are economic laws which can be transgressed only at your peril. With positivism, there is a tendency to leap into ad hoc economic theory.

Only the State legally obtains its revenue by coercion.

Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue from coercion, from taxation.

The more consistently Austrian School an economist is, the better a writer he will be.