Libertarian Quotes

“There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
― Ayn Rand

“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
― Frederic Bastiat

“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.”
― Camille Paglia

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
― Frédéric Bastiat

“Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting--or even demanding--their own enslavement.”
― Larken Rose

“Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you never met, and to take pride in accomplishments you had no part in.”
― Doug Stanhope

“The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.”
― Thomas Sowell

“It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“I'm not scared of the Maos and the Stalins and the Hitlers.
I'm scared of the thousands of millions of people that hallucinate them to be "authority", and so do their bidding, and pay for their empires, and carry out their orders.
I don't care if there's one looney with a stupid moustache. He's not a threat if the people do not believe in "authority".”
― Larken Rose

“Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

“The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.”
― John Cleese

“The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”
― Albert Camus

“The law is an opinion with a gun.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“SCREW CHILDREN!
That's the mantra of the world.
Instead of burying them with a national debt, shoving them in shitty schools, drugging them if they don't comply, hitting them, yelling at them, indoctrinating them with religion and statism and patriotism and military worship, what if we just did what was right for them? The whole world is built on "screw children", and if we changed that, this would be an alien planet to us.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“If you personally advocate that I be caged if I don't pay for whatever "government" things YOU want, please don't pretend to be tolerant, or non-violent, or enlightened, or compassionate. Don't pretend you believe in "live and let live," and don't pretend you want peace, freedom or harmony. It's a simple truism that the only people in the world who are willing to "live and let live" are voluntaryists. So you can either PRETEND to care about and respect your fellow man while continuing to advocate widespread authoritarian violence, or you can embrace the concepts of self-ownership and peaceful coexistence, and become an anarchist.”
― Larken Rose

“What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“The "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" begins with "life", and "life" begins at conception.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.”
― A.E. Samaan

“I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.”
― Albert Jay Nock

“Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god.”
― Stefan Molyneux