Libertarian famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
-- Adam Smith -
It is easier for a libertarian to attack the science of global warming than to alter one's core libertarian beliefs.
-- Al Seckel -
Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.
-- Alexander Haig -
Development cannot really be so centered only on those in power.
-- Amartya Sen -
The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible "mixed economy," thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. -
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do.
-- Benjamin Barber -
Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
-- Berkeley Breathed -
At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.
-- Bernard Bailyn -
I'm a Libertarian. I'm liberty, justice for all, liberty for all.
-- Big Boi -
To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst.
-- Bob Black -
In a modern democracy, not only can a libertarian be elitist; a libertarian has to be elitist. To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right.
-- Bryan Caplan -
I wear the chain I forged in life....I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.
-- Charles Dickens -
I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes.
-- Clarence Thomas -
I would like to be interpreted as a liberal libertarian, like leave everybody alone and let them do their own thing.
-- Clint Eastwood -
My wife and I are both Libertarian; she was a Democrat and I was a Republican, and we both met in the middle somewhere.
-- Clint Eastwood -
Libertarian: everyone leaves everyone else alone
-- Clint Eastwood -
The important question is, therefore, not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings organise their society.
-- Colin Ward -
Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan -
The Free Market is Mother Nature's way of organizing economic activity.
-- David D. Aitken -
Government has a monopoly on the legal use of force and violence.
-- David D. Aitken -
Trying to be a socialist and a libertarian is obviously a very difficult balancing act, which nobody has pulled off too successfully in this century.
-- David Hare -
But the stupidity which is common to all such "explanations" is, of course, simply that of proceeding as though the merits of a theory - such things as truth, or probability, or explanatory power - could not possibly be among the reasons for its currency.
-- David Stove -
Libertarians should say, 'I love this country too much to take away votes from the Republican'
-- Dennis Prager -
The average family pays more in taxes than it spends on food, clothing, and shelter combined.
-- Dick Armey -
... the modern state masks itself in moral ideologies which obscure its actual conduct. One of the most compelling and insidious of these ideologies is the doctrine of natural rights. It was to secure these rights that the modern state was invented in the first place, and it is impossible, especially for Americans, not to be seduced by the doctrine. But it is nonetheless a philosophical superstition.
-- Donald Livingston -
Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.
-- Drew Carey -
I never thought I was a libertarian until I picked up Reason magazine and realized I agree with everything they had printed.
-- Drew Carey -
Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.
-- Epictetus -
If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.
-- Epictetus -
As Barbara Streisand discovered, adopting a militaristic posture against a tech-savvy mob of civil libertarians is not going to be of much help: Many of them run their own servers and blogs - and have thousands of friends on their social networks - so overzealous attempts to silence them only lead to wider dissemination of sensitive information.
-- Evgeny Morozov -
The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
-- Frederic Bastiat -
Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche -
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky -
I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.
-- George Mason -
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
-- George Orwell -
Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.
-- George Will -
A classic liberal is more like a libertarian. I'm sorry. Classic liberal, actually, from the 1800s has a totally different meaning than a liberal who is [modern] classic.
-- Glenn Beck -
Never trust anyone who calls himself a libertarian socialist. They're bound to be deeply confused, at best.
-- Glenn Reynolds -
People ask me what I am politically and I've previously offered this equation: I became a conservative by being around liberals. And I became a libertarian after being around conservatives.
-- Greg Gutfeld -
Formerly an anti-Semite was somebody who hated Jews because they were Jews and had a Jewish soul. But nowadays an anti-Semite is somebody who is hated by Jews.
-- Hajo Meyer -
Throughout the nation's history, the national destiny of the United States has been understood in antimilitaristic, libertarian terms.
-- Hans Morgenthau -
The state operates in a legal vacuum. There exists no contract between the state and its citizens.
-- Hans-Hermann Hoppe -
Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats.
-- Harry Browne -
Libertarians know that a free country has nothing to fear from anyone coming in or going out - while a welfare state is scared to death of poor people coming in and rich people getting out.
-- Harry Browne -
A Libertarian society of unfettered individualism spreads its benefits to virtually everyone - not just those who have the resources to seize political power.
-- Harry Browne -
The libertarian good society lies... in the maximum dispersion of property compatible with effective production or, as process, in progressive reconciliation of conflicts between equality and efficiency. Such process involves increasing dispersion both of wealth among persons and families and of proximate productional control among enterprises or firms.
-- Henry Calvert Simons -
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
-- Hilaire Belloc -
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
-- Honore de Balzac -
I really didn't know much about the Libertarians. I knew they were for less government and more individual freedom. I liked that.
-- Howard Stern -
A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.
-- Hugh Kingsmill -
When there is money in your hand and not in your heart, it will not harm you even if it is a lot; and when it is in your heart, it will harm you even if there is none in your hands.
-- Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya -
By going on the defensive... libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from "polite" company.
-- Ilana Mercer -
I'm not a complete libertarian. There is a proper role in some areas of the government to have rules and regulations - I'm not an anarchist.
-- Jack Abramoff -
The civil libertarians among us would rather defend the constitution than protect our nation's security.
-- Jeff Sessions -
I'd like to see a Republican Party that embraces a lot of the libertarian ideas.
-- Jim DeMint -
The debate in the Republican Party needs to be between libertarians and conservatives.
-- Jim DeMint -
The 'Libertarian' thing was a mistake on my part for saying it, but I am.
-- Joe Lhota -
Laws do not curb the lawless. After all, that's why we call them 'lawless.'
-- Joel Miller -
I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.
-- Joel Salatin -
Well, I'm a libertarian conservative, so I believe in limited government/maximum individual freedom.
-- John Bolton -
Maybe it's my libertarian philosophy: but being in government is hard.
-- John Bolton -
It seems strange to make a priori arguments about the relative performance of governments and the markets in health care when there is so much empirical evidence.
-- John Quiggin -
The principle of laissez-faire may be safely trusted to in some things but in many more it is wholly inapplicable; and to appeal to it on all occasions savors more of the policy of a parrot than of a statesman or a philosopher.
-- John Ramsay McCulloch -
Fascism isn't a libertarian doctrine! It just isn't, never will be and it can't be cast as one.
-- Jonah Goldberg -
If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.
-- Joseph Sobran -
One of the failings of ideologues is their inability to see that everyone else isn't necessarily an ideologue like them.
-- Josh Marshall -
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
-- Karl Popper -
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
-- Kim Stanley Robinson -
The minimum that most minimalists want leaves in place just the institutions who protect their interests. That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
-- Kim Stanley Robinson -
I'm a libertarian. I think a lot of people are libertarians and are afraid to admit it - or don't know.
-- Kurt Russell -
I was brought up as a Republican. But when I realized that at the end of the day there wasn't much difference between a Democrat and Republican, I became a libertarian.
-- Kurt Russell -
Decriminalization would take the profit out of drugs and greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the drug-related violence that is currently plaguing our streets.
-- Kurt Schmoke -
Beloved friends and comrades... the national Libertarian Party is dead.
-- L. Neil Smith -
The Lindsey Graham via foreign policy is going to beat Rand Paul's libertarian view of foreign policy. It will beat Barack Obama's view of foreign policy. It will beat Hillary Clinton's view of foreign policy.
-- Lindsey Graham -
We like to imagine that in history, truth will prevail through sheer persuasive power. Sadly, this is not the case. Truth needs champions...
-- Llewellyn Rockwell -
Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.
-- Ludwig von Mises -
The vigorous man industriously striving for the improvement of his condition acts neither more nor less than the lethargic man who sluggishly takes things as they come. For to do nothing and to be idle are also action, they too determine the course of events.
-- Ludwig von Mises -
The public firm can nowhere maintain itself in free competition with the private firm; it is possible today only where it has a monopoly that excludes competition. Even that alone is evidence of its lesser economic productivity.
-- Ludwig von Mises -
I brag on the Democratic Party. We're libertarian on social issues, it's live and let live. Fiscally, we're conservative and responsible, and were environmentally conscious.
-- Mark Udall -
When I'm asked where libertarians fit on the left-right spectrum, I say we don't. We're above the line.
-- Marshall Fritz -
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns - they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.
-- Max Stirner -
I don't know that the Libertarian Party has an official position on the separation of church and state.
-- Michael Badnarik -
Libertarians love their children at least as much as the Democrats and the Republicans, probably more.
-- Michael Badnarik -
The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech.
-- Michael Shermer -
I believe in libertarian options because they allow an interesting management of the capital and are based on co-operation, reciprocity, contract, federation.
-- Michel Onfray -
Some libertarians succeed by re-inventing the wheel. Most libertarians fail by re-inventing the flat tire.
-- Mike Cloud -
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
-- Milton Friedman -
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
-- Milton Friedman -
I am a libertarian with a small 'l' and a Republican with a capital 'R'. And I am a Republican with a capital 'R' on grounds of expediency, not on principle.
-- Milton Friedman
