Quotations

Government, with its laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox, is a vicious oppressor of the individual, and more to be feared than fierce tigers. —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 500 B.C.

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. —Tacitus (Roman Senator), Annals, 117 A.D.

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces. —Etienne de La Boetie, The Politics of Obedience, 1552

If the safety of the people be the supreme law, and this safety extend to, and consist in, the preservation of their liberties, goods, lands, and lives, that law must necessarily be the root and the beginning, as well as the end and the limit, of all magisterial power, and all laws must be subservient and subordinate to it. —Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, 1698

All human constitutions are subject to corruption, and must perish, unless they are timely renewed, and reduced to their first principles. —Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, 1698

No man can confer upon others that which he has not in himself. —Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, 1698

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. —Denis Diderot

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. —Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, 1751

It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. —Voltaire, Questions sur les Miracles, 1765

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. —Voltaire, Questions sur les Miracles, 1765

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter II, 1776

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. —Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. —Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. —Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Stephens Smith, 1787

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. —Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, 1788

Where there is liberty there is no violence, and where there is violence there is no liberty. —Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 1797

I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. —Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, 1800

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. —Thomas Jefferson, from his first inaugural address, 1801

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, 1809

The farmer and manufacturer can no more live without profit than the laborer without wages. —David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817

The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and of great passions from the pursuit of power, and it very frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortune of the State until he has discovered his incompetence to conduct his own affairs. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else. —Frédéric Bastiat, The State, 1848

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone. —Frédéric Bastiat, The State, 1848

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen. —Frédéric Bastiat, “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen,” 1849

The production of security should, in the interests of the consumers of this intangible commodity, remain subject to the law of free competition. Whence it follows: That no government should have the right to prevent another government from going into competition with it, or to require consumers of security to come exclusively to it for this commodity. —Gustav de Molinari, The Production of Security, 1849

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. —Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. —Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain. —Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850

I believe that my theory is correct; for whatever be the question upon which I am arguing, whether it be religious, philosophical, political, or economical; whether it affects well-being, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, property, labor, exchange, capital, wages, taxes, population, credit, or Government; at whatever point of the scientific horizon I start from, I invariably come to the same thing—the solution of the social problem is in liberty. —Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. —John Stewart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress, we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. —Colonel David Crockett, Not Yours to Give, 1867

The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters and which of them shall be slaves. —Lysander Spooner, No Treason. No. 1, 1867

A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. —Lysander Spooner, No Treason. No. 6, 1867

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist. —Lysander Spooner, No Treason. No. 6, 1867

The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust. —Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity, 1877

It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others. —Lord Acton, letter to Mandell Creighton, 1881

…you will not make people wiser and better by taking liberty of action from them. A man can only learn when he is free to act. It is the consequences of his own actions, and the consequences of these same actions as he sees them in other persons, that teach him. —Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885

You tell me a majority has a right to decide as they like for their fellow-men. What majority? 21 to 20? 20 to 5? 20 to 1? But why any majority? What is there in numbers that can possibly make any opinion or decision better or more valid, or which can transfer the body and mind of one man into the keeping of another man? —Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885

There cannot possibly be two supreme laws. Either the will of the majority or the rights of the individual are the highest law of our existence; one, whichever one it is to be, must yield in presence of the other. —Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885

Whatever party names we may give ourselves, this is the question always waiting for an answer: Do you believe in force and authority, or do you believe in liberty? —Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. —Lord Acton, letter to Mary Gladstone, 1887

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. —Lord Acton, letter to Mandell Creighton, 1887

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. —Winston Churchill, speech to the British House of Commons, 1904

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. —Evelyn Beatrice Hall, The Friends of Voltaire, 1906

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. … I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.” —Franz Oppenheimer, The State, 1908

At first, the conquerors usually looted and murdered their victims and then went on to find others. After centuries, however, the conquering tribes decided to settle down among their victims; instead of killing them, they regularized and rendered the loot permanent, settling down to rule their victims on a long-range basis. The annual tribute became “taxes,” and the land of the peasants was parceled out among the warlords to become subject of annual feudal rent. In this way, a state and a ruling class emerged from previously stateless societies. … The conqueror in the first stage is like the bear, who for the purpose of robbing the beehive, destroys it. In the second stage, he is like the beekeeper, who leaves the bees enough honey to carry them through the winter. —Franz Oppenheimer, The State, 1908

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. —Jeannette Rankin

Do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it. —Ludwig von Mises (his motto)

War is the health of the state. —Randolph Bourne, The State, 1918

Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. —Max Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” 1919

All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts. —Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, 1922

In fact, Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. —Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, 1922

There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way. —Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition, 1927

We allow other parties to exist. However, the fundamental principle that distinguishes us from the West is as follows: one party rules, and all the others are in jail! —Mikhail Tomsky, in the November 13, 1927, issue of the Russian newspaper Trud (Labor)

Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. —Benito Mussolini, from a speech delivered to the Italian Chamber of Deputies on December 9, 1928

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. —H.L. Mencken

Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine, whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization. —José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, 1930

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore, every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power. —Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State, 1935

The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime. … It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants. —Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State, 1935

Either we believe that the State exists to serve the individual or that the individual exists to serve the State. —Ayn Rand, a letter to John Temple Graves, 1936

Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. —Mao Zedong, from a speech he delivered at the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University in November 1938

But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else. —Ayn Rand, Anthem, 1938

If you give the State power to do something for you, you give it an exact equivalent of power to do something to you. —Isabel Paterson and W.J. Cameron

First, they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. —Mahatma Gandhi

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. —Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, 1944

The ultimate basis of an all-around bureaucratic system is violence. —Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, 1944

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them. —Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, 1944

The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule. —F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. —Winston Churchill, speech during the General Election campaign, 1945

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. —F.A. Hayek, Individualism: True and False, 1945

The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it. —Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, 1946

It is the Communists’ intention to make people think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others. It is the communists’ aim to discourage all personal effort and to drive men into a hopeless, dispirited, gray herd of robots who have lost all personal ambition, who are easy to rule, willing to obey and willing to exist in selfless servitude to the State. —Ayn Rand, “Screen Guide for Americans,” 1947

Men in government, therefore, should be those who aim at making government as unnecessary as possible. Contraction, not expansion, should be the aim. —Leonard E. Read, Pattern for Revolt, 1948

A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings. —Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 1949

Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. —Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action, 1949

The wavelike movement affecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression, is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion. There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved. —Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action, 1949

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. —Albert Camus

Capitalism is essentially a system of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. It pours a horn of plenty upon the common man. It has raised the average standard of living to a height never dreamed of in earlier ages. It has made accessible to millions of people enjoyments which a few generations ago were only within the reach of a small elite. —Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, 1956

They loathe capitalism because it has assigned to this other man the position they themselves would like to have. —Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, 1956

The bulk of public programs are designed primarily to benefit the middle classes but are financed by taxes paid primarily by the upper and lower classes. —Aaron Director

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. —Ayn Rand, John Galt’s oath in Atlas Shrugged, 1957 

Government is essentially the negation of liberty. —Ludwig von Mises, Liberty and Property, 1958

When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare. —Howard E. Kershner

What’s really terrifying is when you realize that bureaucracy isn’t simply a growth on the body of the State. If it were only that, it could be cut off. No, bureaucracy is the very essence of the State. —Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, 1959

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable. —F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960

The state has transformed judicial review from a limiting device to another instrument for conferring legitimacy on the government’s actions. —Charles Lund Black Jr., The People and the Court: Judicial Review in a Democracy, 1960

Individual responsibility—facing the consequences of one’s actions—is a prerequisite for a free society. —F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom. —F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. —Ronald Reagan, an address to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, 1961

Planning other people’s actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them. —Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method, 1962

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. —Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 1962

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. —Milton Friedman, from a lecture at the Council for Economic Education in Bombay, India, 1963

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue. —Barry Goldwater, from his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, 1964

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases while the citizens may act only by permission, which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history—the stage of rule by brute force. —Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964

Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without. —Milton Friedman

The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is to inflate and to destroy the value of the currency. —Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money?, 1964

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. —Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966

Foggy metaphors, sloppy images, unfocused poetry, and equivocations such as “a hungry man is not free” do not alter the fact that only political power is the power of physical coercion and that freedom in a political context has only one meaning, the absence of physical coercion. —Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966

The “private sector” of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and … the “public sector” is, in fact, the coercive sector. The voluntary sector is made up of goods and services for which people voluntarily spend the money they have earned. The coercive sector is made up of the goods and services that are provided, regardless of the wishes of the individual, out of taxes that are seized from him. —Henry Hazlitt, Man vs. the Welfare State, 1969

The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from someone else. —Henry Hazlitt, Man vs. the Welfare State, 1969

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. —C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, 1970

In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing. —Carl Assar Eugén Lindbeck, The Political Economy of the New Left, 1971

The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “non-aggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. —Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 1973

A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers. —F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, 1976

The idea of a strictly limited constitutional State was a noble experiment that failed, even under the most favorable and propitious circumstances. —Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 1973

The more power the state has, the more it attracts people who want to use that power for their own ends. —David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, 1973

The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations. —David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, 1973

The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. —Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 1973

If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment. —Milton Friedman

Hence, in education as well as in all other activities, the more that government decisions replace private decision-making, the more various groups will be at each other’s throats in a desperate race to see to it that the one and only decision in each vital area goes its own way. —Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 1973

In trying freedom, in abolishing the State, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. —Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 1973

Only we can replace the governance of men by the administration of things. —Murray N. Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, 1974

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. —Milton Friedman, from an interview on The Open Mind, 1975

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another. —Milton Friedman, Free to Choose, 1980

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best. —Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, 1980

Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only—how much government is spending. Because that’s the true tax. Every budget is balanced. There is no such thing as an unbalanced federal budget. You’re paying for it. If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it in the form of inflation, or in the form of borrowing. —Milton Friedman, from an interview on Idea Channel, 1980

A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. … On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. —Milton Friedman, Free to Choose, 1980

Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. —Ronald Reagan, from his first inaugural address, 1981

If the government were to take over the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand in five years. —Milton Friedman

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, The Ethics of Liberty, 1982

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. —F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988

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

Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state is a complete failure of civilization, while a totally voluntary society is its ultimate success. —Mark Skousen, “Persuasion vs. Force,” 1991

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. —Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional? And Other Essays, 1993

Truth is treason in the empire of lies. —Dr. Ron Paul

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. —Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian, 1994

The fewer things politicians control, the less it matters who controls the politicians. —Dr. Mary Ruwart

The fact is that there is no such thing as a government of law and not people. The law is an amalgam of contradictory rules and counter-rules expressed in inherently vague language that can yield a legitimate legal argument for any desired conclusion. For this reason, as long as the law remains a state monopoly, it will always reflect the political ideology of those invested with decision-making power. —John Hasnas, “The Myth of the Rule of Law,” 1995

I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money. —Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays, 1999

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. —Thomas Sowell, Wake Up, Parents!, 2000

It is absurd to believe that an agency which may tax without consent can be a property protector. Likewise, it is absurd to believe that an agency with legislative powers can preserve law and order. —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, 2001

Only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. —Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, 2002

To those who believe government is a necessary evil: you’re half right. —Robert P. Murphy, Chaos Theory, 2002

…unmask the State and showcase it for what it really is: an institution run by gangs of murderers, plunderers and thieves, surrounded by willing executioners, propagandists, sycophants, crooks, liars, clowns, charlatans, dupes and useful idiots—an institution that dirties and taints everything it touches. —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, from his keynote address at the Property and Freedom Society’s fifth anniversary meeting, 2006

The government exists outside the matrix of exchange. There are no market prices for the goods and services it endeavors to produce. The revenue it receives is not a reward for social service but rather money extracted from the public by force. It is not spent with an eye to return on investment. As a result there is no means for the government to calculate its own profits and losses. Its inability to calculate with attention to economic rationality is the downfall of governments everywhere. Its decision-making is ultimately

economically arbitrary and politically motivated. —Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., The Left, the Right, and the State, 2008

Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man. —Walter E. Williams, I Love Greed, 2012

The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending. —Thomas Sowell, from an interview with John Hawkins, 2012

The transformation of charity into legal entitlement has produced donors without love and recipients without gratitude. —Antonin Scalia, Is Capitalism or Socialism More Conducive to Christian Virtue?, 2013

When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, no matter who you vote for, you always wind up getting John McCain. —Thomas E. Woods Jr.

This idea that individuals can be and should be sacrificed for the “greater good” is the essence of the fascist/socialist/collectivist philosophy. —Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Problem with Socialism, 2016

The soul-crushing misery, the mass exodus to get out, the endless broken promises so endemic to socialism simply cannot be dismissed as the failures of a few bad people. There’s something rotten in the system itself. Indeed, the very ideas from which it springs are rotten. At socialism’s core is end-justifies-the-means, moral relativist, anti-individual and collectivist rubbish. Bad people are everywhere, but nothing brings them forth and licenses them to do evil more thoroughly than concentrated power and the subordination of morality to the service of a statist ideology. That is the essence of the socialist vision, the iron fist within the velvet glove that belies all the happy talk to the contrary. —Lawrence W. Reed

What causes poverty? Nothing. It’s the original state, the default and starting point. The real question is: What causes prosperity? —Per Bylund, The Pete Quinones Show, Episode 276, 2019

When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination. —Thomas Sowell