Murray Rothbard famous quotes

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.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Hands #Class #Minorities

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Ignorance #Discipline #People

There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Liberty #Economic #Good Things

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

#Liberty #Pay #Cost

I see no other conceivable strategy for the achievement of liberty than political action. Religious or philosophical conversion of each man and woman is simply not going to work; that strategy ignores the problem of power, the fact that millions of people have a vested interest in statism and are not likely to give it up.... Education in liberty is of course vital, but it is not enough; action must also be taken to roll back the State...
-- Murray Rothbard

#Religious #Philosophical #Taken

Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism
-- Murray Rothbard

#Expression #Anarchism #Capitalism

If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real world he must also have the right to sustain his life by grappling with and transforming resources; he must be able to own the ground and the resources on which he stands and which he must use. In short, to sustain his human right.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Real #Men #Self

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

#Race #Enemy #Progress

The libertarian sees the State as a giant gang of organized criminals, who live off the theft called "taxation" and use the proceeds to kill, enslave, and generally push people around. Therefore, any property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. Any person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Hands #People #Liberty

We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.' The government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that 'we are all part of one another,' must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Suicide #Government #People

You don't need a treaty to have free trade.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Liberty #Needs #Treaties

The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Jargon #Revolutionary #Theory

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 Rothbard

#Peace #War #Pride

The more the government intervenes to delay the market's adjustment, the longer and more grueling the depression will be, and the more difficult will be the road to complete recovery.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Recovery #Government #Delay

The libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles. And if he himself values his own goals so lightly, how highly will others value them.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Goal #Libertarian #Principles

Remember that the minimum wage law provides no jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs are the inevitable result.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Jobs #Law #Minimum Wage

There can be no such thing as 'fairness in taxation.' Taxation is nothing but organized theft, and the concept of a 'fair tax' is therefore every bit as absurd as that of 'fair theft.'
-- Murray Rothbard

#Liberty #Taxation #Fairness

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.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Men #Gun #Hands

The State is a gang of thieves writ large - the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Thieves #Gang #Individual

It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Law #Liberty #Moral

The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Liberty #States #Leap

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Liberty #Economic #Produce

There can be no truly moral choice unless that choice is made in freedom; similarly, there can be no really firmly grounded and consistent defense of freedom unless that defense is rooted in moral principle. In concentrating on the ends of choice, the conservative, by neglecting the conditions of choice, loses that very morality of conduct with which he is so concerned. And the libertarian, by concentrating only on the means, or conditions, of choice and ignoring the ends, throws away an essential moral defense of his own position.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Freedom #Responsibility #Mean

Since leaving office in 1977, Dr. Kissinger has continued to play a highly influential role in U.S. politics, in the U.S. media, and in the Rockefeller world empire. It was Kissinger, along with David Rockefeller, who was decisive in the disastrous decision of President Carter to admit the recently toppled Shah of Iran, old friend and ally of the Rockefellers into the United States, a decision that led directly to the Iranian hostage crisis and to Carter's downfall.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Media #Iran #Play

The libertarian creed...offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, and a free-market economy.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Past #Government #Peaceful

If you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Attitude #Fall #Thinking

I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Anarchist #Individual #Possibility

It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes. If individuals do not know their own interests in many cases, they are free to turn to private experts for guidance. It is absurd to say that they will be served better by a coercive, demagogic apparatus.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Exercise #Government #Organization

Just as no one is morally required to answer a robber truthfully when he asks if there are any valuables in one’s house, so no one can be morally required to answer truthfully similar questions asked by the State, e.g., when filling out income tax returns.
-- Murray Rothbard

#House #Answers #Return

Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the state is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist .
-- Murray Rothbard

#Expansion #Individual #States

Money ... is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, the state is able to gain unquestioned control over the unit of all accounts, the state will then be in a position to dominate the entire economic system, and the whole society.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Nerves #Able #Gains

Governmental subsidy systems promote inefficiency in production and efficiency in coercion and subservience, while penalizing efficiency in production and inefficiency in predation.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Government #Subsidies #Coercion

Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Law #Order #Natural

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 Rothbard

#New York #Block #Government

I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Rights #Focus #Defense

[T]he crucial question is not, as so many believe, whether property rights should be private or governmental, but rather whether the necessarily 'private' owners are legitimate owners or criminals. For ultimately, there is no entity called 'government'; there are only people forming themselves into groups called 'governments' and acting in a 'governmental' manner. All property is therefore always 'private'; the only and critical question is whether it should reside in the hands of criminals or of the proper and legitimate owners.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Believe #Rights #Government

In short, the early receivers of the new money in this market chain of events gain at the expense of those who receive the money toward the end of the chain, and still worse losers are the people (e.g., those on fixed incomes such as annuities, interest, or pensions) who never receive the new money.
-- Murray Rothbard

#People #Liberty #Income

The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Independent #Intellectual #Criticism

This, by the way, is the welfare state in action: Its a whole bunch of special interest groups screwing consumers and taxpayers, and making them think they're really benefiting.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Thinking #Special #Groups

All of the services commonly thought to require the State-from the coining of money to police protection to the development of law in defense of the rights of person and property-can be and have been supplied far more efficiently and certainly more morally by private persons. The State is in no sense required by the nature of man; quite the contrary.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Men #Rights #Law

It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Exercise #Trying #Would Be

The concept of life and perfection is incompatible. BUT so is death and perfection
-- Murray Rothbard

#Perfection

Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Hierarchy #Absurd #Behinds

Every man must have freedom, must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices, for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.
-- Murray Rothbard

#Men #Order #Personality