Libertarian Quotes

There is no law, there is only conjecture. The Progressive ethos changes the law's meaning according to fad and fashion.

~ A.e. Samaan

History could not be any clearer: Rights given by fad and fashion are just as easily taken away. The Constitution matters.

~ A.e. Samaan

Government programs didn’t arise because the people demanded them or because the free market was unable to provide needed services. They arose because the politicians found them to be a convenient way to buy votes with other people’s money, a convenient way to enlarge their own power, a convenient way to reward their political cronies, and a convenient way to keep people dependent on government.

~ Harry Browne

When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.

~ Ron Paul

The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.

~ Harry Browne

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

~ Frédéric Bastiat

Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence. Certain commodities came to be money quite naturally, as the result of economic relationships that were independent of the power of the state.

~ Carl Menger

Nowadays the job of the judge is not to do justice. The judge is more of a functionary . He's like a civil servant whose job is to interpret words written down by another branch of the government, whether those words are just or not.

~ Stephan Kinsella

The free market is not a system. It is not a policy dictated by anyone in particular. It is not something that Washington implements. It does not exist in any legislation, law, bill, regulation, or book. It is what you get when people act on their own, entirely without central direction, and with their own property, and within human associations of their own creation and in their own interest. It is the beauty that emerges in absence of control.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

It is only you, treading in the blessed path of peace and freedom, who can bring about the true regeneration of society, and with it the true happiness of your own lives.

~ Auberon Herbert

Here's something I still can't get over. Amazes and thrills me every time. I'm sitting here and want a certain book. So I search, click, and then I have the book. Every time, my heart does a little leap of joy. What a beautiful world the market is making.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

The government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged 'services' and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.

~ Robert Higgs

If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

The valuations which result in determination of definite prices are different. Each party attaches a higher value to the good he receives than to that he gives away. The exchange ratio, the price, is not the product of equality of valuation, but on the contrary, the product of a discrepancy in valuation.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

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

~ Ludwig Von Mises

In spite of its alluring name, the welfare state stands or falls by compulsion. It is compulsion imposed upon us with the state’s power to punish noncompliance. Once this is clear, it is equally clear that the welfare state is an evil the same as every restriction of freedom.

~ Wilhelm Röpke

Liberty should be understood as freedom from the government, specifically, freedom from the initiation of physical force by the government.

~ George Reisman

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

~ Gustave De Molinari

Freedom is the foundation for all wonderful things in life.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

The phenomenon of economic ignorance is so widespread, and its consequences so frightening, that the objective of reducing that ignorance becomes a goal invested with independent moral worth.

~ Israel M. Kirzner

Ultimately, we need to take control over the money supply out of the hands of our governments and make the production of money again subject to the principle of free association. The first step to endorsing and promoting this strategy is to realize that governments do not—indeed cannot—fulfill any positive role whatever through the control of our money.

~ Jörg Guido Hülsmann

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

~ Rose Wilder Lane

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly “reforming” their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact they’re always busy “reforming” is an implicit admission that they didn’t get it right the first 50 times.

~ Lawrence W. Reed

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

~ Robert Nozick

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

~ Ludwig Von Mises

So what? Why should an a priori proof of the libertarian property theory make any difference? Why not engage in aggression anyway?” Why indeed?! But then, why should the proof that 1+1=2 make any difference? One certainly can still act on the belief that 1+1=3. The obvious answer is “because a propositional justification exists for doing one thing, but not for doing another.” But why should we be reasonable, is the next come-back. Again, the answer is obvious. For one, because it would be impossible to argue against it; and further, because the proponent raising this question would already affirm the use of reason in his act of questioning it. This still might not suffice and everyone knows that it would not, for even if the libertarian ethic and argumentative reasoning must be regarded as ultimately justified, this still does not preclude that people will act on the basis of unjustified beliefs either because they don’t know, they don’t care, or they prefer not to know. I fail to see why this should be surprising or make the proof somehow defective.

~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I don't want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.

~ Peter D. Schiff

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

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

~ Frédéric Bastiat

Collectivists see the world the way Mr. Magoo did—as one big blur. They homogenize people in a communal blender, sacrificing the discrete features that make us who we are.

~ Lawrence W. Reed

The State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as “taxation,” although in less regularized epochs it was often known as “tribute.” Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

As I explain in 'What It Means to be an Anarcho-Capitalist', to be an anarchist simply means you oppose aggression, and you realize the state necessarily commits aggression. If you are not an anarchist, it means you either condone aggression, or think the state does not necessarily commit aggression. As you say you are not an anarchist, can you please tell us which one describes you? Are you in favor of aggression (like socialists and criminals are)? Or, do you think the state does not commit aggression (like children brainwashed by government schools think)?

~ N. Stephan Kinsella

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

~ Isabel Paterson

Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, bunglingly, at greater cost, and with less fruit than spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it deems its prerogative, or through the overwhelming competition which it exercises, it kills or paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, atropic or abortive, are lost to the great social body.

~ Hippolyte Taine

If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.

~ Lysander Spooner

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

~ Milton Friedman

Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?

~ Murray N. Rothbard

Government” itself does no harm, because it is a fictional entity. But the belief in “government” – the notion that some people actually have the moral right to rule over others – has caused immeasurable pain and suffering, injustice and oppression, enslavement and death.

~ #Name?