Libertarian Quotes - Page 8

I think libertarians need somebody who can articulate getting from A to Z. But you know, if G is achievable, how about it? Let's get there!

It's easier to scare someone than to persuade him.

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

... the next revolution ... will be when those who work refuse to support those who don't.

Truth and news are not the same thing.

You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants.

Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insincerity and mendacity.

If we have learned anything in the past quarter century, it is that we cannot Federalize Virtue.

The plans differ; the planners are all alike.

Opportunity could be defined in so many ways. There's one way of defining it, equality of opportunity, which is in fact the equality of capability, but the libertarians got there first and they have - like the Americans getting onto the moon, naming every crater after something like an astronaut - they have got there and named "opportunity" in a way that we cannot get ownership of now.

You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.

Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.

We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.

Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance.

The greatest productive force is human selfishness.

You have to be careful as a libertarian because you can sound very Republican.

When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry.

The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.

There is no moral distinction between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax.

The minimum that most minimalists want leaves in place just the institutions who protect their interests. That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.

Throughout the nation's history, the national destiny of the United States has been understood in antimilitaristic, libertarian terms.

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest "functionaire" possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

Perpetual war for perpetual peace.