Statism Quotes

It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it, and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.

~ Albert Jay Nock

Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep.

~ Stefan Molyneux

July 4, the day we celebrate giving our political masters independence from conscience, morality, consequences for evil doing, and basic social and economic reality.The fireworks are the glowing tears of your children's incinerated futures.Cheer happy slaves - your only chains are your deluded joys. Cheer and sing, because for you, songs of death are easier than questions of life.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Statism is an unnatural disaster.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Rights are something made up by governments to make you feel like you're buying something with your taxes.

~ Stefan Molyneux

History is the same story with different costumes.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here's one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.

~ Thomas Sowell

Liberty is not about class war, income war, race war, national war, a war between the sexes, or any other conflict apart from the core conflict between individuals and those who would seek power and control over the human spirit. Liberty is the dream that we can all work together, in ways of our choosing and of our own human volition, to realize a better life.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a state-managed society.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

~ John Lennon

Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?

~ Frédéric Bastiat

Historical definition of a country's borders... ...here's where my murder geography ends and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderers to expand my murder-fest.

~ Stefan Molyneux

It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands.

~ Auberon Herbert

An atheist who is a statist is just another theist.

~ Stefan Molyneux

People and their values are almost infinitely diverse, and people will never agree on many elements of social arrangements that might be subjected to uniform rules of governance. Hence, the greater the scope of strictly individual self-determination, the lesser the scope of governance, and the greater the tolerance with which people live and let live among their fellows, the more peaceful and flourishing society will be

~ Robert Higgs

(A Free Market in Education: The Answer to Prayer, And Other Issues)No matter where you are on the issue, there is no solution to it within a government school context, only perpetual conflict. The answer involves choice, competition and private alternatives. If you don't like what a business offers, you don't argue endlessly about it; you walk across the street. Why is this principle so complicated for some people?

~ Lawrence W. Reed

People who can't imagine order without imposition always end up favoring power over liberty.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

Some capitalism suffers from cronyism. All of socialism is perverted by the crony statism of the powerful few.

~ A.e. Samaan

Statism is political fashion.Individual liberty is eternal.

~ A.e. Samaan

I was once a statist, and then I researched The Holocaust. I am now a Libertarian.

~ A.e. Samaan

There is a very dangerous myth that #Hitler was solely fueled by racism. His desire to engineer society was pervasive. Racism alone cannot explain what happened in The Holocaust without also addressing Hitler's statist policies.

~ 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

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

To eliminate statism is not to physically subdue the rulers, but to mentally liberate the ruled.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

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

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

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

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