Libertarian Quotes - Page 3

All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals.

There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.

Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.

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.

Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. - Second Amendment to the Constitution An armed society is a polite society.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

War is the Health of the State.

Dependence leads to subservience.

A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.

Peter Kropotkin described Anarchism as the extreme left wing of socialism - a view with which I completely agree. One of my deepest concerns today is that the libertarian socialist core will be eroded by fashionable, post- modernist, spiritualist, mystic individualism.

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

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

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.

The era of resisting big government is never over.

The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.

Politicians, like bombers, seldom see their victims.

Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression.

Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more.

When I'm asked where libertarians fit on the left-right spectrum, I say we don't. We're above the line.

Those who trade liberty for security have neither.