Quotes on Libertarianism

It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.

Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.

The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.

Laws are like sausages. You sleep far better the less you know about how they are made.

What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.

The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.

To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.

Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.

Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.

The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

A good End cannot sanctify evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top".

Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.