L. Neil Smith famous quotes

We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Believe #Usa #America

Gun control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Gun #Police #Bullets

[N]o one's ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It's just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Differences #Giving #Democracy

Few things are more laughably pitiable than authority once it has been successfully defied.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Respect #Authority

The War on Drugs employs millions - politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and now the military - that probably couldnt find a place for their dubious talents in a free market, unless they were to sell pencils from a tin cup on street corners.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Military #War #Drug

People - pardon me, journalists and politicians - have often accused me of believing that I'm above the law. And yet, who isn't? Everywhere you prod it, even with the shortest stick, the established system isn't simply corrupt, it's unequivocally putrescent. The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes. Of course I'm above the law. And so are you.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Believe #Law #People

People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Men #Animal #Gun

The freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and Constitutional right - subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Choices #Fundamentals #Weapons

Each day, it seemed, another law was passed to impoverish and diminish them, punishing them for whatever success they achieved and rewarding their less competent and industrious neighbors.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Equality #Law #Each Day

My current novel, Pallas , is all about that culture war - in fact it's been called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Sagebrush Rebellion - and yet what I hear all too often from libertarians is that they don't read fiction.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Uncles #War #Cabins

Politicians need human misery. ... Government's a disease masquerading as its own cure.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Government #Needs #Disease

Great men don't 'move to the center' great men move the center!
-- L. Neil Smith

#Moving #Men #Great Men

If there were a generic one-word expression for 'one whose fear of the uncertainties of success moves him to surrender at the very moment of victory', it would be 'Republican'.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Moving #Expression #Victory

Once you've taken a public stand you know is right, never back down; anything less than a rock-hard stance will let your enemies nibble you to death.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Taken #Rocks #Enemy

I always said that in a country where a legislature, its sessions limited by statute, could alter reality by turning back the clock (I actually saw this done, once, with a long pole pushing on the hour hand), any travesty was possible. I see nothing lately to prove me wrong.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Country #Reality #Hands

As Al Franken has demonstrated, liberals give lousy talk radio.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Giving #Radio #Als

Just as liberalism is the main force that drives conservatism and maintains its popularity in some quarters, conservatism is the reason liberalism continues to enjoy the traction that it does in our poor civilization.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Civilization #Doe #Popularity

Worse than thieves, murderers, or cannibals, those who offer compromise slow you and sap your vitality while pretending to be your friends. They are not your friends. Compromisers are the enemies of all humanity, the enemies of life itself. Compromisers are the enemies of everything important, sacred, and true.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Humanity #Enemy #Important

Try never to speak of your enemies by name. Any publicity is still publicity - and there are those for whom your disapproval constitutes a recommendation.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Names #Enemy #Trying

Choose your allies carefully: it's highly unlikely that you'll ever be held morally, legally, or historically accountable for the actions of your enemies.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Enemy #Allies #Action

Choose your enemies carefully: you'll probably be known much better and far longer for who they were, than for anything else you ever managed to accomplish.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Enemy #Accomplish

You cannot force me to agree with you. You can force me to act as though I agree with you but then you'll have to watch your back. All the time.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Watches #Force #Agree

I'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Tired #Exercise #Rights

Beloved friends and comrades... the national Libertarian Party is dead.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Party #Libertarian #Beloved

Many individuals spend a considerable portion of their lifetimes in terror of one imagined catastrophe or another. The classic is that your immortal soul will be consigned to eternal torment in the never-ending subterranean barbecue if you fail to follow the whacky edicts of one particular set of puckered dogwhistles or another. You may recall from the great movie Strange Days that a "dogwhistle", is a guy whose ***** is so tight that when he farts, only dogs can hear him.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Dog #Guy #Soul

There's a big difference between keeping the peace, which is something folks do pretty well themselves, and enforcing the law, which is another thing altogether.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Law #Differences #Bigs

Like the government, corporations must be bound with the chains of the Constitution, and especially of the Bill of Rights.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Rights #Government #Bills

We must oppose programs that would take food from the mouths of younger generations to buy prescription drugs for old people, and we must do it... for the children.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Children #People #Drug

A lot is said, by foreigners and the left, about America being a violent society. Yet if you subtract the crime statistics for its largest cities places that have been under the strict political control of so-called "progressives", sometimes for many generations what remains, the real America, is the most peaceful, productive, prosperous, and truly progressive civilization in all of human history.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Real #Civilization #Cities

To politicians, solved problems represent a dire threat of unemployment and poverty. That's why no problem ever tackled by the government has ever been solved. What they want is lots of problems they can promise to solve, so that we'll keep electing them or letting them keep their jobs in a bureaucracy metastasizing like cancer.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Jobs #Cancer #Government

I do know enough about economics and so do you to understand that the 'stimulus program' of Barack Obama and his ravenous parasitic hordes, supposedly designed to 'repair' America's broken economy, reveals him to be unimaginably stupid, gibberingly insane, or simply the biggest, most barefaced criminal thug ever to occupy the White House. And that's saying a lot.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Stupid #Thug #White

Despite the Internet 's origin in the late 1960s as a government sponsored means of communication between the Department of Defense, private industry, and academia, it has been at its best and generated the greatest economic, social, and technological benefits since it was 'liberated' by the hordes of 'geeks' who were originally hired to run it by employers who were not themselves conversant with computers, and couldn't tell when their employees were exchanging official traffic or trading dirty jokes and recipes for ***** brownies.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Running #Dirty #Communication

I have a recurring daymare that when the Glorious People's SWAT Teams smash their way in, most of us by which I mean members of the general freedom movement will be caught flatfooted, sitting in our underwear behind our computer monitors, guzzling Jolt and gorging on Cheetos, while arguing with our friends and enemies online about immigration or abortion, two of the issues that the Lefties know they can always rely on to keep that general freedom movement divided and powerless.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Team #Mean #Two

The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet's development is as historically important to humanity perhaps even more so as Gutenberg 's invention of the printing press.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Exercise #Humanity #Important

We're all a bunch of badminton birdies who just got batted from the Republican side of the court to the Democrat side. We'll eventually get batted back again, of course, unless libertarians can manage to do something about it. If your principal concern, like mine, is freedom, there's absolutely no discernable difference between the two 'majors,' and for all practical purposes, they're one big party the Boot On Your Neck party pretending to be two.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Party #Two #Differences

Know when to give up a lost cause. Anyone who needs to be persuaded to be free, doesn't deserve to be.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Giving Up #Needs #Causes

Psychologist Nathaniel Branden speaks of a benevolent sense of life possible to those with rational, productive values, vividly contrasted with the coercive parasitic group-culture of mystics and altruists we live in, where people all around you seem a burdensome annoyance, a threat to your survival. Having been told from childhood that life is a zero-sum game in which you owe everything to others, at some level you worry all the time that someday the bastards will collect. And collect they do, every April 15th. Why do you think they call it collectivism?
-- L. Neil Smith

#Zero #Thinking #Games

The Bill of Rights isn't about us, it's about them . It isn't a list of things we're permitted to do, it's a list of things they aren't allowed even to consider.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Rights #Bills #Lists

the miserable specimens who call themselves ' liberals ' are really conservatives: they're desperately even hysterically defending a welfare-warfare kleptocracy that is now at least four generations old, against growing numbers of us (unlike Republicans , who seem to become more ignorant with every passing year) who have actually managed to learn something from history and are struggling to dismantle said kleptocracy.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Struggle #Years #Numbers

Repealing drug laws would remove the risks involved with producing and distributing drugs, bringing 'street prices' crashing down (it's estimated that a 'spoon' of ***** would cost about a quarter in the free market), thereby eradicating any incentive that criminals might have to compete with legitimate businesses, and greatly reducing if not eliminating altogether any economic reason to ' push ' drugs on children.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Children #Law #Drug

Thanks to guys like Boss Tweed, famous for saying, 'I don't give a damn who does the voting, as long as I do the nominating,' there hasn't been an honest election in the USA since sometime around the War Between the States.
-- L. Neil Smith

#War #Usa #Long

Taxes are a barbaric remnant of ancient times in which early farmers, tied to the land, no longer able to roam freely, unable to fight back with awkward agricultural tools the way they once could with hunting implements, became victims, first, of itinerant plunderers, then of bandits settling down beside them to become the governments we know today.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Fighting #Hunting #Government

Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective economic value, anyway while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Giving Up #Government #Law

Any politico who's afraid of his constituents being armed, should be. Leaders of the anti-gun movement (for the most part, politicians who enthusiastically advocate confiscatory taxation and government control of everything) realize that a populace is much easier to herd, loot and dispose of if it has been stripped of its weapons. The naked fraud and transparent fascism of victim disarmament must be eradicated through the repeal of all gun laws at every level of government.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Gun #Government #Law

Most of us agree that the United Nations is the vanguard of a foreign invasion and must be driven from our shores. Liberalism Progressivism all forms of left wing collectivism , are equally alien to the Founders ' America and must be extirpated, root and branch, laughter and derision being the most effective weapons. Look at the way they have reduced Hillary Clinton to an insignificant greasy spot on the pages of history, turned Albert Gore into an object of merriment, and are accomplishing the same for Barry and Micky Obama.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Laughter #Wings #Roots

If conservatives really believed in individual liberty, as they endlessly claim and if they used both halves of their brains then they'd be libertarians . Instead, they sabotage themselves, and their cause, by constantly generating one spurious reason after another to deprive other people of their freedom.
-- L. Neil Smith

#People #Brain #Liberty

Of all the groups that sometimes claim to own your life, family is the hardest to defend your individual sovereignty from.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Groups #Sometimes #Individual

Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong and demonstrably more destructive for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Mistake #Government #People

America didn't have a drug problem before it passed drug laws.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Law #America #Drug

Human rights are an aspect of natural law, a consequence of the way the universe works, as solid and as real as photons or the concept of pi. The idea of self- ownership is the equivalent of Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution by natural selection, of general relativity, and of quantum theory. Before humankind discovered any of these, it suffered, to varying degrees, in misery and ignorance.
-- L. Neil Smith

#Real #Ignorance #Ideas