Libertarianism Quotes

“I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty Volumes I-IV

“If almost everyone is in favor of feeding the hungry, the politician may find it in his interest to do so. But, under those circumstances, the politician is unnecessary: some kind soul will give the hungry man a meal anyway. If the great majority is against the hungry man, some kind soul among the minority still may feed him—the politician will not.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behaviour is called...policy.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“They want to keep the government ‘out of our bedrooms.’ What are they talking about? I have to live in their society, remember. And I built my house, which means I built my own bedroom. The government told me how far apart the studs had to be in my bedroom wall, they dictated how thick the sheetrock had to be, they mandated how far apart the sheetrock screws had to be, they had policies on the configuration of those sheetrock screws, they have laws on the size of the windows and what kind of glass I can have in them, and there are stern legal warnings on the mattress tags. What do you mean, you want to keep the government out of our bedrooms? The president is probably contemplating, right this minute, the establishment of a bedroom czar.”
― Douglas Wilson, Empires of Dirt: Secularism, Radical Islam, and the Mere Christendom Alternative

“Once a state has completely withered away, it is an extremely difficult task to re-create it, as Blackwell quickly discovered. If Blackwell had been under any illusions that the Quakers were a meek and passive people, he was in for a rude surprise. He was to find very quickly that devotion to peace, to liberty, and to individualism in no sense implies passive resignation to tyranny. Quite the contrary.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty Volumes I-IV

“The enemies of freedom from the left, right, and middle have one common denominator: faith in the state.”
― Roland Baader

“Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.”
― James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan

“Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point-by-point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That's libertarians for you--anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“There was no particular reason for the Canadian government to remember what had happened to the Cherokee in the 1840s. After all, most governments can't remember the promises that got them elected.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

“I know what I want up to the age of two hundred. Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”
― Ayn Rand

“Theocracy is the destruction of human freedom in the name of God. Libertinism is the destruction of moral norms in the name of liberty. Neither will do.”
― Robert Sirico, Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy

“If then, merely out of regard to population, it were right that paederasts should be burnt alive, monks ought to be roasted alive over a slow fire. (Offences Against One's Self,”
― Jeremy Bentham

“Not until "human nature" itself progresses morally will the majority of people prefer peaceful and boring market relations to the violent and exciting relations between coercer and coerced, predator and victim.”
― Thomas Szasz, Faith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices

“Die Freiheit wird fast immer mit Sätzen erschlagen, die mit "ja, aber" beginnen.”
― Roland Baader, Freiheitsfunken: Aphoristische Impfungen

“In the history of the twentieth century, the principal dramatis personae were National and International Socialisms, better known as Nazism and Communism. Their citizens evaded the duty of self-responsibility by claiming to be "following orders." Following orders -attributed to or issued by God, the State, Science, Medicine-is always the easy way out. Refusing to do so requires self-reliance and resisting temptations and threats.”
― Thomas Szasz, Faith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices

“The cost of government control is human liberty, prosperity, and dignity.”
― Jeffrey Tucker

“The Americans invented the 2nd Amendment.
The French invented the "le madame guillotine".
Neither was invented for hunting.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Anarcho-capitalism is to “minimal statism” what a cure is to a painkiller.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“The death of George Floyd has been used as a catalyst. It was the kind of “event” for which the aforesaid revolutionary formation (Black Lives Matter) was created. Now, Black Lives Matter has become a power in its own right.

It is only the ignorance of the many, and the “fog of war,” that makes the casual observer dubious as to authorship of the present insurrection. For those who have not studied communist tactics, further shocks are in store. The existing political system failed to support the thin blue line, and that line is crumbling. The communists are winning.”
― J.R. Nyquist

“Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.”
― Terry Eagleton

“In the field of justice, man's will is all; men can move mountains, if only men so decide.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays

“What we have eaten in advance in recent decades in the paper credit binge, we will have to starve for in coming decades.”
― Roland Baader

“A respect for choice, if taken seriously, does not translate into the simplistic libertarian prescriptions often trotted out on the heels of the personal responsibility rhetoric. It is impossible to have accountability for choices with no legal or regulatory mechanism to enforce it.”
― Kent Greenfield, The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits

“The challenge that faced the English in the seventeenth century was how to curb the power of an absolute monarch. In the twenty-first century, it is the markets that have taken on the mantle of absolutism, placing themselves about the jurisdiction of national governments.”
― Billy Bragg, The Three Dimensions of Freedom

“The ideological erosion of the bourgeois order at every level — economic, political, cultural, social — would proceed the initiation of direct frontal assaults on the state.
Carl Boggs
Gramsci’s Marxism, p. 52
via J.R.Nyquist”
― J.R.Nyquist

“Was it laziness or incompetence that Times reporters hadn’t by then participated in left-activist group-phone calls about bolt cutters, gasoline cans and matches? (I know a conservative journalist who listened in on such calls.) And what is the theory of these journalistic geniuses? — That mobs of looters, in city after city, were summoned out of the night by political apathy?”
― J.R. Nyquist

“We are not allowed to say that a communist revolution has begun. We are not allowed to say that Marxist groups are engaged in a power grab; that they are using racial issues as camouflage, “extending the domain of egalitarianism”; that looting stores, beating white citizens and police officers has everything to do with communist supremacy (and nothing to do with good race relations).

For those who have studied communism, who have sat in communist meetings, the situation is perfectly obvious. Yet the mainstream media pretends there are no communists. They pretend the left is blameless. Our generals wink at the rioters. The President is opposed or mocked by governors and mayors. The communists are immune to counterattack because they have seized the egalitarian high ground of American politics. They have followed Gramsci’s method.”
― J.R. Nyquist

“Nietzsche warned that the tarantulas want to fill the world “with the storms of their justice.” Their “Will to Equality” has become the basis for a false system of valuation. Today’s tarantulas are better known as “social justice warriors.” They are, in Nietzsche’s words: “against all that hath power.” But this outcry against power masks the tarantulas’ very own lust for power.”
― J.R. Nyquist

“Many years ago I confronted a political activist whose inordinate desire for power was suddenly exposed. Instead of covering up and denying, he said to me: “I do not want to be an insect, like my father.” This shocking admission is something that Nietzsche, as the psychologist of the “will to power,” addressed with the following lines:

What the father has hid comes out in the son; and oft have I found in the son the father’s revealed secret.

Inspired ones they resemble; but it is not the heart that inspires them — but vengeance. And when they become subtle and cold, it is not spirit, but envy, that makes them so.

Their jealously leads them also into thinker’s paths; and this is the sign of their jealousy — they always go too far: so that their fatigue has at last to go to sleep on the snow.

In all their lamentations sounds vengeance, in all their eulogies is maleficence; and being judge seems to them bliss.”
― J.R. Nyquist