Quotes on Libertarianism

One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman.

I believe the states can best govern our home concerns, and the general government our foreign ones.

Government, in it's last analysis, is organized force.

A tyranny based on ... deception and maintained by terror must inevitably perish from the poison it generates within itself.

When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional right to free speech, it acts lawlessly; and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.

I let go of all desire for the common good, and the good becomes as common as the grass.

America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation.

When taxes are too high, people go hungry.

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

Show me a movement that doesn't hate somebody and I will join it at once.

You cannot adopt politics as a profession and remain honest.

If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves

The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of human liberty, which means the future of civilization.

Self-interest is not myopic selfishness. It is whatever it is that interests the participants, whatever they value, whatever goals they pursue. The scientist seeking to advance the frontiers of his discipline, the missionary seeking to convert infidels to the true faith, the philanthropist seeking to bring comfort to the needy - all are pursuing their interests, as they see them, as they judge them by their own values.

Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal.

[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics

The program of liberalism if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production.

There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation.

The plans differ; the planners are all alike.

A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.

The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.