Libertarianism Quotes - Page 23

• Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Taken, Liberty, Crowds

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• Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior.

  Allan H. Meltzer

  Loss, Mind, Liberty

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• Law! What do I care about the law? Ain't I got the power?

  Cornelius Vanderbilt

  Law, Liberty, Care

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• Does America really need 70 percent of the world's lawyers? Is it healthy for our economy to have 18 million lawsuits coursing through our system annually?

  Dan Quayle

  America, Healthy, Liberty

  "Address by Quayle On Justice Proposals Irks Bar Association". Vice President Dan Quayle's address to the American Bar Association, www.nytimes.com. August 14, 1991.

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• We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it's hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald's from a speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Horse, Cancer, Mcdonalds

  "Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut" by P. J. O'Rourke, (1st edition ed.), New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996.

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• A traffic jam is a collision between free enterprise and socialism. Free enterprise produces automobiles faster than socialism can build roads and road capacity.

  Andrew Joseph Galambos

  Liberty, Jam, Libertarian

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• If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Law, Class

  "No Name in the Street". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1972.

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• According to the Tax Foundation, taxes now consume more than 38% of the average family's budget. That is more than is spent on food, clothing, housing, and transportation combined. Compare this to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor one-third of their output - and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us?

  Daniel J. Mitchell

  Average, Giving, Liberty

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• Multiple political parties are a fact of life throughout Europe and most of the West. Today the only countries without strong multiparty political systems are the United States and a number of third world military dictatorships.

  Thomas Naylor

  Country, Strong, Military

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

  Wally Hickel

  Support, Liberty, Libertarian

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• We should distinguish at this point between "government" and "state" ... A government is the consensual organization by which we adjudicate disputes, defend our rights, and provide for certain common needs ... A state on the other hand, is a coercive organization asserting or enjoying a monopoly over the use of physical force in some geographic area and exercising power over its subjects.

  David Boaz

  Exercise, Rights, Government

  David Boaz (1997). “Libertarianism: A Primer”, p.208, Simon and Schuster

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• Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.

  William Lloyd Garrison

  Practice, Liberty, Libertarian

  William Lloyd Garrison, Bruce Rogers (1905). “The Words of Garrison: A Centennial Selection (1805-1905) of Characteristic Sentiments from the Writings of William Lloyd Garrison”

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• Government, in it's last analysis, is organized force.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Government, Liberty, Analysis

  Woodrow Wilson, Ronald J. Pestritto (2005). “Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings”, p.49, Lexington Books

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• The police can't stop an intruder, mugger, or stalker from hurting you. They can pursue him only after he has hurt or killed you. Protecting yourself from harm is your responsibility, and you are far less likely to be hurt in a neighborhood of gun-owners than in one of disarmed citizens - even if you don't own a gun yourself.

  Harry Browne

  Hurt, Responsibility, Gun

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• There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, Law, Libertarian Party

  Martin Luther King (Jr.), Alex Ayres (1993). “The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr”, Plume

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• You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Government, People, Liberty

  P. J. O'Rourke (2007). “Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut”, p.228, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles.

  Gerry Spence

  Pain, Men, Liberty

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• I say that the Second Amendment doesn't allow for exceptions - or else it would have read that the right "to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, unless Congress chooses otherwise." And because there are no exceptions, I disagree with my fellow panelists who say the existing gun laws should be enforced. Those laws are unconstitutional [and] wrong - because they put you at a disadvantage to armed criminals, to whom the laws are no inconvenience.

  Harry Browne

  Gun, Law, Political

  Second Amendment rally in Arkansas, August 8, 2000.

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• 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

  Men, Liberty, Libertarian

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.146, Vintage

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• In our government-controlled schools we are taught that Lincoln was our greatest president because his war ended slavery and saved the Union. As usual, the other side of the story - the side that reflects poorly on the government - somehow gets lost.

  Richard J. Maybury

  War, School, Government

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• The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their Nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Agreement, Names, People

  Alexis de Tocqueville (1847). “Democracy in America”, p.419

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• Painful as it may be to hear it, there's nothing special about the people of this country that sets them apart from the other people of the world. It is the Bill of Rights, and only the Bill of Rights, that keeps us from becoming the world's biggest banana republic. The moment we forget that, the American Dream is over.

  Alexander Beresford Hope

  Dream, Country, Rights

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• Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Government, Self, Hands

  Henry Hazlitt, Hans F. Sennholz (1993). “The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt”, Foundation for Economic Education

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• The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society. Historians know that both phenomena were especially marked in the declining eras of the Roman Empire in the West and of its successor state, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire.

  William Henry Chamberlin

  Liberty, Population, Byzantine

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• It seems that wherever the Welfare State is involved, the moral precept, "Thou shalt not steal," becomes altered to say: "Thou shalt not steal, except for what thou deemest to be a worthy cause, where thou thinkest that thou canst use the loot for a better purpose than wouldst the victim of the theft."

  F. A. Harper

  Liberty, Purpose, Use

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