Libertarianism Quotes - Page 21

• The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means.

  Henry Grady Weaver

  Mean, Views, Agony

  Henry Grady Weaver (2016). “The Mainspring of Human Progress [Revised Edition]”, p.38, Pickle Partners Publishing

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

  Milton Friedman

  Liberty, Doe, Libertarian

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• The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the "best" sources.

  Walter Karp

  Powerful, Liberty, Libertarian

  Walter Karp (1992). “Buried alive: essays on our endangered republic”, Franklin Square Pr

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• Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principle moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Names, Interesting, Political

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• To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Sex, Party, Brain

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• What I'd like to see developing is an American radicalism, libertarian in character, which relies, however weak, faint, and even mythic these traditions may be, on the American libertarian tradition. I don't mean right-wing libertarianism obviously.

  Murray Bookchin

  Character, Mean, Wings

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

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• An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

  Adlai Stevenson I

  Editors, Liberty, Libertarian

  "he Fine Art of Political Wit". Book by Leon Harris, 1964.

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• Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine.

  Victor C. Ferkiss

  Struggle, Mean, Loss

  Victor C. Ferkiss (1969). “Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality”

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• In levying taxes and in shearing sheep, it is well to stop when you get down to the skin.

  Austin O'Malley

  Sheep, Liberty, Skins

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• In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs - monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism - have been working their way through the culture ever since.

  Peter York

  People, Culture, Deregulation

  "This Much I Know". Interview with Stuart Husband, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2007.

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• Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.

  Henry Hyde

  Hate, Liberty, Speech

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• Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.

  Ayn Rand

  Government, Special, Liberty

  "The Voice of Reason" by Ayn Rand, 1989.

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• What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.

  Learned Hand

  Government, Different Faces, Political

  Learned Hand (1968). “The art and craft of judging: the decisions of Judge Learned Hand”

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• The present struggle seems less about abolishing big government than about who gets to use it.

  William Greider

  Struggle, Government, Liberty

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• The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease, the right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong.

  Samuel Gompers

  Order, People, Freedom Of Speech

  Samuel Gompers (1967). “Seventy Years of Life and Labour: An Autobiography”

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• The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.

  Donald James

  Self, Perfect, Historical

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• With all that IMF money, the Thailand's and Mexico's are spared the consequences of their fiscal incompetence, and Wall Street's heavy hitters are spared the consequences of their stupid investments. The global economy is a rigged game, rigged so Third World politicians, rich investors and global corporations win - and U.S. taxpayers lose.

  Pat Buchanan

  Wall, Stupid, Winning

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• If we do not halt this steady process of building commissions and regulatory bodies and the special legislation like huge inverted pyramids over every one of the simple constitutional provisions, we shall soon be spending many billions of dollars more.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Simple, Pyramids, Liberty

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1941). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1940, Volume 9”, p.573, Best Books on

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• The era of big government is over.

  William J. Clinton

  Government, Presidential, Liberty

  State of the Union Address, 23 Jan. 1996

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• A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Dog, Stupid, Boys

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• 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.

  Harry Browne

  Libertarian Party, Government, Giving

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• Truth, in its struggles for recognition, passes through four distinct stages. First, we say it is damnable, dangerous, disorderly, and will surely disrupt society. Second, we declare it is heretical, infidelic and contrary to the Bible. Third, we say it is really a matter of no importance either one way or the other. Fourth, we aver that we have always upheld it and believed it.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Struggle, Liberty, Four

  Elbert Hubbard (1911). “A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard”

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• At the heart of that western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man...is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for that person's benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

  Robert Kennedy

  Heart, Men, Practice

  Robert F. Kennedy's Day of Affirmation Address at the University of Capetown, South Africa, www.mtholyoke.edu. June 6, 1966.

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• If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Views, Numbers, Liberty

  First Inaugural Address, 4 Mar. 1861

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• [S]tatism is but socialized dishonesty; it is feathering the nests of some with feathers coercively plucked from others - on the grand scale. There is no moral difference between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax or any other social program.

  Leonard Read

  Differences, Liberty, Income

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