Top 100 Libertarian Quotes
#1. "Gun Control" isn't about guns. It's about control. If guns are outlawed, how can we shoot the liberals?
Mike Gunn
#2. [H]aving the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.
Glenn Greenwald
#3. I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.
Milton Friedman
#4. I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.
A.E. Samaan
#5. No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a state-managed society.
Jeffrey Tucker
#6. The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
H.L. Mencken
#7. I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Rick Santorum
#9. Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good.
Abraham Lincoln
#10. In other words, "free markets" ideology, with its libertarian idealism, has in fact produced Mussolini-style corporatism. And until we learn to call the resulting looting by its proper name, it is certain to continue.
Yves Smith
#11. To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano.
Henry Hazlitt
#12. Very few tyrants argued for the slavery of the masses. Instead, they argued for their right to protect the people from themselves.
A.E. Samaan
#13. The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.
Harry Browne
#14. Not only can no one predict the future, we don't understand the present - and there isn't even any certainty about the past.
Harry Browne
#15. The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.
Frederic Bastiat
#16. Because the state necessarily commits aggression, the consistent libertarian, in opposing aggression, is also an anarchist.
Stephan Kinsella
#17. I guess nobody assumes anybody is a libertarian. It's a more complex political discussion than most people are used to, to explain why you think the way you do about public education or drug laws, and why it's not as simple as being for or against something.
Dave Barry
#18. Enjoy yourself -it's later than you think.
Guy Lombardo
#19. It is dissent from government policies which defines the true Patriot
Ron Paul
#20. Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#21. If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.
Ludwig Von Mises
#22. You cannot adopt politics as a profession and remain honest.
Ambrose Bierce
#24. My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm-as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.
Camille Paglia
#25. I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. I don't think the libertarians have it right when it comes to what the Constitution's all about. I don't think they have it right as to what our history is.
Rick Santorum
#26. If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.
Jacob G. Hornberger
#27. 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.
Neil Peart
#28. Libertarians are conservatives who still get high.
Drew Carey
#29. 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
#30. It seriously irks me when people mistake Ron Paul for a libertarian. The man is as much a libertarian as Barack Obama is a liberal.
Michel Templet
#31. Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights.
A.E. Samaan
#32. Despots are elected and deposed.
Laws are passed and repealed.
Nations rise and fall.
Individual liberty is eternal.
A.E. Samaan
#33. Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.
Hugh Jackman
#34. That's the first sign you know you're a Libertarian. You see the red light. You stop. You realize that there's not a car in sight. And you put your foot on the gas.
Gary Johnson
#35. I think I realized that Dave Barry was funnier than I'll ever be, and he made no attempt to make any actual points. He had a general libertarian point of view, but in general, he just liked to make jokes.
Joel Stein
#36. There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.
Isabel Paterson
#37. It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.
Ayn Rand
#38. 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.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#39. Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats.
Harry Browne
#41. Theories of "natural law" and the "law of nations" are another excellent example of discussions destitute of all exactness. [ ... ] "Natural law" is simply that law of which the person using the phrase approves[ ... ]
Vilfredo Pareto
#43. The vitriol and viciousness is the inevitable result of a government increasingly deciding the vital aspects of people's lives.
A.E. Samaan
#44. I reject the premise that liberal and libertarian values are necessarily in conflict. In fact, I often self-identify as a 'classical liberal.'
John Mackey
#45. My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility
Camille Paglia
#46. The chances of your being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The chance of your being robbed by your own government? That's easy: 100 per cent.
Joseph Sobran
#47. When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign.
Stefan Molyneux
#48. You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.
It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us.
Stefan Molyneux
#49. Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
Isabel Paterson
#50. Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.
A.E. Samaan
#51. We tried to change Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam changed us.
Tony Thomson
#52. There's a huge swath of humanity that has developed verbal abilities to extract resources from guilt-ridden people.
They used to be priests, and now they're leftists.
Stefan Molyneux
#53. By going on the defensive ... libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from "polite" company.
Ilana Mercer
#54. Capitalists desire purchasing power. Socialists lust for the power to plan society. Which is worse?
A.E. Samaan
#55. The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
Ludwig Von Mises
#56. I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
William Safire
#57. Justice requires that you should not place the burdens of one man on the shoulders of another man, even though he is better able to bear them. In plainer words, that you should not make one set of men pay for what is used by another set of men.
Auberon Herbert
#59. Of all the tyrannies on human kind the worst is that which persecutes the mind.
John Dryden
#60. Camille Paglia is: 'the nipple-pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly who poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters.
Naomi Wolf
#61. I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal - instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.
Thomas Sowell
#62. It's herding kittens. If kittens had a lot of guns and an overdose of neo-Libertarian property theory.
James S.A. Corey
#63. I don't agree with the libertarians. I want my security first. I'll deal with all the details after that.
Trent Lott
#64. The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.
Ayn Rand
#65. I am a Libertarian Republican in the Goldwater style.
Roger Stone
#66. Form 1040 was chosen by the IRS because for every $50 you earn, you get 10 and they get 40.
Jay Leno
#67. The opposite of Nazi is neither Republican nor Democrat, conservative or liberal. Totalitarianism's diametric opposite of is Libertarianism.
A.E. Samaan
#68. It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands.
Auberon Herbert
#69. The difference between libertarianism and socialism is that libertarians will tolerate the existence of a socialist community, but socialists can't tolerate a libertarian community.
David Boaz
#70. I always accepted the libertarian position of minimum regulation in the sale and use of firearms because I placed guns under the beneficial rubric of minimal restrictions on individuals.
Michael Shermer
#72. Laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt
Tacitus
#73. It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.
Murray Rothbard
#74. 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
#75. The entire Nazi war machine was only possible because of past, present and future violations of the non aggression principle (achievable only through government).
Stefan Molyneux
#76. No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.
Ludwig Von Mises
#77. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom.
Ronald Reagan
#78. If you require force to promote your ideal, there is something wrong with your ideal.
J.S.B. Morse
#79. A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
Milton Friedman
#80. The sadist desires to command and control. The masochist desires to be freed from the burdens of liberty. That is Socialism.
A.E. Samaan
#81. Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure.
William Ernest Hocking
#82. Legislating morality grows big government immensely, and helps fashion the noose the government will use to ultimately hang you by.
A.E. Samaan
#83. Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do.
Benjamin Barber
#85. For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade.
Noam Chomsky
#86. Don't tax you, don't tax me;
Tax the companies across the sea.
Dan Rostenkowski
#87. I don't see myself as conservative, but I'm not ultra-leftist. You build a philosophy of your own. I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.
Clint Eastwood
#88. The principle of laissez-faire may be safely trusted to in some things but in many more it is wholly inapplicable; and to appeal to it on all occasions savors more of the policy of a parrot than of a statesman or a philosopher.
John Ramsay McCulloch
#89. The Lindsey Graham via foreign policy is going to beat Rand Paul's libertarian view of foreign policy. It will beat Barack Obama's view of foreign policy. It will beat Hillary Clinton's view of foreign policy.
Lindsey Graham
#90. I'm a staunch civil libertarian; I really believe that the individual is more important than any societal value.
Richard Grossman
#92. The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.
Adolf Hitler
#93. The World's Smallest Political Quiz is responsible for many Americans' first contact with libertarian ideas. While traveling around the country, I have often heard people say, 'I never knew I was a libertarian until I took the Quiz!'
Ron Paul
#94. Socialists eat their children. The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once statists come into power. Statists abhor free thinking.
A.E. Samaan
#95. Some people object to libertarian ideas because there are too many irresponsible people in the world - people who will cause trouble if the government doesn't restrain them.
Harry Browne
#96. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
Donald James
#97. The vigorous man industriously striving for the improvement of his condition acts neither more nor less than the lethargic man who sluggishly takes things as they come. For to do nothing and to be idle are also action, they too determine the course of events.
Ludwig Von Mises
#98. 'Tis true that governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit everyone who enjoys a share of protection should pay out of his estate his proportion of the maintenance of it.
John Locke
#99. I don't drink to make others look better, I just drink to make myself feel prettier.
Brooke Bida
#100. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill
