Best Libertarianism Quotes

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.

If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.

That government is best which governs least.

Abuse of power isn’t limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we’re not vigilant.

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.

America needs fewer laws, not more prisons.

How ever sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group’s greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, religion or all four.

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

To disarm the people… was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.

The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

It’s no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of duty.

The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone.

This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.

Libertarianism is a theory of politics that is so compelling that once you have absorbed it, it becomes the lens through which you end up understanding all economic and political events.

People fear witches, and burn women.

There is only one way to kill capitalism – by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.

Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

Look not to the politicians; look to yourselves.

Libertarianism is the enemy of all racism.

When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.

I have no evidence that libertarianism leads to a better life. I just think it is morally right.

In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs – monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism – have been working their way through the culture ever since.

My whole take on libertarianism is simply that I don’t know what’s best for other people.

When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics.

You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.

Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I’m an idealist.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

What I’d like to see developing is an American radicalism, libertarian in character, which relies, however weak, faint, and even mythic these traditions may be, on the American libertarian tradition. I don’t mean right-wing libertarianism obviously.

My contact with [Cato] was strange. They’re ideologues, like Trotskyites. All questions must be seen and solved within the true faith of libertarianism, the idea of minimal government. And like Trotskyites, the guys from Cato can talk you to death.

Pure libertarianism believes that people will be generous and help each other. Well, they won’t. I wish it were so, and I live that way.

I’m talking of the idea, basically very widespread in America, that the less government the better, which is obviously being used to the advantage of the big corporations, but none-the-less has very radical implications. The idea of a people that exercises a great deal of federalist or confederalist control, the ideal of a grass-roots type of democracy, the idea of the freedom of the individual which is not to get lost in the mazes of anarcho-egotism à la Stirner, or for that matter right-wing libertarianism.