Libertarianism Quotes - Page 2

The desire to engineer humanity is a sign of a mind warped by megalomania and lust for power.

Centrally planned economies are upended by out of control population. Their escape valve is eugenics.

The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.

[Judith Warner:] Our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothering can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we’ve stopped trying to do on a society-wide one.

When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign.

Libertarians are not supposed to be egalitarians… And yet there it is: egalitarianism has become the unspoken but very real driving force in the current Official movement. Once group egalitarianism becomes the norm, other groups than blacks will clamor for the privileges of ‘victim status.’ Sure enough, that jostling for victim privilege is now the major hallmark of American politics.The Official libertarians have so far not displayed enormous affinity for Latino or disabled ‘rights,’ but they are highly enthusiastic about the ‘rights’ of women and feminism generally. And in particular, libertarians have displayed great fervor for gay ‘rights’ and stress the evils of ‘discrimination’ against gays. So ardently are libertarians devoted to gay rights that the word ‘libertarian’ in the public press has now become almost a code word for champion of gay rights.Only his pro-gay agenda accounts for the ardor of Republican libertarians toward Massachusetts Governor Weld, whom they embrace as, in the current slogan, ‘fiscally conservative but socially tolerant.’ (The ‘fiscally conservative’ refers to a one-time budget cut followed, the next time around, by a compensatory budget increase.) ’Socially tolerant,’ in the current atmosphere, means a devotion to the entire Left cultural agenda, from gay rights to compulsory multicultural propaganda and condomization in the public schools.

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private liberty.

Making universal prosperity a right is the surest way to universal poverty.

You can either have individual liberty, or dependence on the government. One is designed to undo the other.

LEFTISTS EAT THEIR CHILDREN: The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once the "revolution" actually comes about.

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

It is infinitely better to rely on the pursuit of economic interest by landowners or street companies than to depend on the dubious “altruism” of bureaucrats and government officials.

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.

When enough people realize that they are slaves but don't have to be, revolutions happen.

Art was the first casualty of the Socialist and Communist revolutions of the 20th Century. Socialists killed the independent thinkers first.

Despots are elected and deposed.Laws are passed and repealed.Nations rise and fall.Individual liberty is eternal.

The U.S. didn't achieve its liberty or prosperity by mistake. It was by design, and the architects were the Founding Fathers. Don't mess with the Constitution. The Constitution matters.

I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left.

A limited state with free economic systems is the soil where the liberty tree blossoms.

It's freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences and/or ridicule.

Big government = oligarchy. Simple equation. Big government = loss of representation.

When you vote, you play Russian Roulette with a magazine fed pistol.

The theories of the social sciences do not consist of “laws” in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts.

If one prevents a man from working for the good of society while at the same time providing for the satisfaction of his own needs, then only one way remains open to him: to make himself richer and others poorer by the violent oppression and spoliation of his fellow men.

I think, therefore I am an individual... not a drone in a collective. I think, therefore I am... Libertarian

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

Sadly enough, individual liberty remains the ideal of revolutionary thinkers even in the 21st Century.

The real American ideal of cool which is building businesses, protecting freedom at home and abroad, taking responsibility for your actions, and leaving other people alone to live as they damn well please.

It is illogical to say, as many etatists do, that liberalism is hostile to or hates the state, because it is opposed to the transfer of the ownership of railroads or cotton mills to the state. If a man says that sulphuric acid does not make a good hand lotion, he is not expressing hostility to sulphuric acid as such; he is simply giving his opinion concerning the limitations of its use.

Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.

Statism is political fashion.Individual liberty is eternal.

One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over...

More dangerous than bayonets and cannon are the weapons of the mind.

American Progressives have declared war on the sanctity and autonomy of the individual.

Every totalitarian Communist considered themselves as a Socialist first and foremost.

Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods ... What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?

You either limit the government, or you limit the scope of your life. Why is the government that precious to you in the first place?

Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts.

There are those that want freedom from individual responsibility, and then there are those that want individual liberty. "Freedom" and "liberty" no longer mean what they used to. A desire for dependence has been made fashionably desirable.

Socialism is "group-think." How uninformed in history do you have to be to advocate for "group-think"??

Liberty is not something a government gives you. It is a right that no government can legally take away.

Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god.

Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal

If a man loses his money through unwise market speculation or by playing the horses, he has been punished in a manner which we may call passive. By this I mean that another person has not taken special, socially overt steps to harm the "offender." This phenomenon has not received the attention it deserves.

Faith and freedom is great, but it gets nowhere without faith in freedom.

Liberty will never yield equality. Freewill produces a mess that you either accept or reject in favor of slavery.

Centralization is an abomination! Decentralize everything! Leave nothing to the central planners.

Countries adopting free-market capitalism have increased output 70-fold, halved work days and doubled lifespans.

Liberty isn't everything. I just allows everything to happen.

Legislating morality grows big government immensely, and helps fashion the noose the government will use to ultimately hang you by.

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

The earliest use of writing was strictly commercial and economic, not political or bureaucratic. It was trade, entrepreneurship, and stewardship of private property, not politics, "public education" or the creation of national mythology that allowed humankind to transition from prehistory to history. Just as trade, entrepreneurship, and stewardship of private property have always been on the forefront of civilization's advancement, so were they also the driving force behind civilization's emergence.

I would rather contend with an honest asshole than a duplicitous diplomat.

Scratch a “libertarian” these days, and you will find...a leftist.

When, thirty-five years ago, I tried to give a summary of the ideas and principles of that social philosophy that was once known under the name of liberalism, I did not indulge in the vain hope that my account would prevent the impending catastrophes to which the policies adopted by the European nations were manifestly leading. All I wanted to achieve was to offer to the small minority of thoughtful people an opportunity to learn something about the aims of classical liberalism and its achievements and thus to pave the way for a resurrection of the spirit of freedom after the coming debacle.

Some that read this book will find its Libertarian and Constitutionalist slant a bit obtuse and maybe even off-putting. This author makes no apologies for viewing the history of the eugenics movement from this political perspective. It is the ethical and legal underpinnings of the American Revolution that remain as a guiding light while the eugenics movement continues to reemerge long after its alleged demise. Limited, or rather minimal government, goes a long way to curtail the disconnect that emerges when government grows so large that it no longer feels compelled to heed to the dictates of the governed.

If you require force to promote your ideal, there is something wrong with your ideal.

Before the mid-20th century, when American libertarians entangled themselves in conservative coalitions against the New Deal and Soviet Communism, "free market" thinkers largely saw themselves as liberals or radicals, not as conservatives. Libertarian writers, from Smith to Bastiat to Spencer, had little interest in tailoring their politics to conservative or "pro-business" measurements. They frequently identified capitalists, and their protectionist policies, as among the most dangerous enemies of free exchange and property rights.