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Sound Bites

QUOTATION, n.

The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

I don't want the cheese, I just want to get out of the trap.: Spanish Proverb
The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.: Chinese Proverb
Since when do the chickens on the ground shit on the chickens that roost on the top?: Mexican Proverb
Until lions have storytellers, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.: African Proverb
The church is near, but the way is icy; the tavern is far, but I will walk carefully.: Ukranian Proverb
Be happy while you're living, For you're a long time dead.: Scottish Proverb

The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.: -- ?
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggy...' until you can find a rock.: -- ?
The meek shall inherit the Earth... the rest of us are going to the stars.: -- ?
Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.: -- ?
Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today - I think he's from the CIA.: -- ?
When your only tool is a hammer, you tend to treat everything you find like a nail.: -- ?
Democracy is mob rule, but with income taxes.: -- ?
You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.: -- ?
If you don't believe in Gosh you'll be darned to heck.: -- ?

What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook.: Henry David Thoreau
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order, who observe the law when the government breaks it.: Henry David Thoreau, "Slavery in Massachusetts"
I heartily accept the motto, - "That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, - "That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.: Henry David Thoreau
If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my house to do me good, I would run for my life.: Henry David Thoreau

Well, Jazz is definately about the possibilities inherant in our system, 'cause when a band plays, it's dealing with a negotiation. But the thing about Jazz is, it's a healing but not by running. It's the type of healing of engagement. It's like, Well, we have a problem. But we're gonna' heal it with some soul. But in order for us to heal it, we have to deal with it. We can't run from it. The more we run from it, we run into it.: Wynton Marasallas, Ken Burns's Jazz
As an American, you can definately live without Jazz. The only thing you need to live is water and some food. The question of Art in general is non-essential ... to live. But now the style that you gonna' be livin' in, I don't know about that. You don't need a bed to sleep. You don't have to cook food to eat it. You don't have to have clothes of a certain style. You don't have to speak a certain way. Most of the things you are surrounded by, you don't need them, but when you have these things around you, it makes you feel good about living in the world. And it gives you something to look forward to, and it also gives you a way to connect yourself with everything that has happened, and the flow of humans on Earth and of civilization.: Wynton Marsallas, Ken Burns's Jazz, Episode Six.
I contend that the Negro is the creative voice of America, is creative America. And it was a happy day when the first unhappy slave was landed on its shores.: Duke Ellington, Ken Burns's Jazz, Episode Seven
Critics are sometimes extraordinarily obtuse. They claim to wanna' hear new things, but new things bother them because they can't categorize them.: Nat Hentoff, Ken Burns's Jazz, Episode 8

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth; 'I, the state, am the people.': Friedrich Nietzsche
[T]he state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies -- and whatever it has, it has stolen. Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth.: Friedrich Nietzsche
Distrust all men in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.: Friedrich Nietzsche
It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred desires over them.: Friedrich Nietzsche
Many too many are born: the state was invented for the superfluous!: Friedrich Nietzsche
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.: Friedrich Nietzsche

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.: Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964 (1909-1998)
[ but penned by Karl Hess, author of the 1969 Playboy article, "The Death of Politics" -bk]
Anarchists have no quarrel with any institution that contents itself with enforcing the law of equal freedom ... they oppose the State only after first defining it as an institution that claims authority over the non-aggressive individual ...: Benjamin Tucker, Liberty and Politics
Attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell.: Karl Popper
"Saving the world" is just a rationalization for trying to conquer it.: Bob Wallace, "On Not Saving the World"
Liberty should never be mistaken for licence. It is too precious a prize to be degraded by those who accept no obligation to others in the exercise of their freedoms.: Thomas Paine
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.: The Hippocratic Oath
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.: Andre Gide
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.: Seneca
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.: Thomas Paine
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.: Benjamin Franklin
The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.: Woodrow Wilson
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.: George Washington
A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.: George Washington
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients.: Edmund Burke
Republic ... it means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose.: John Wayne
We can foresee a time when . . . the only people at liberty will be prison guards who will then have to lock up one another.: Albert Camus
Every increase in the size of government necessitates a decrease in an individual's freedom.: Christian Harold Fletcher Riley
All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.: George Bernard Shaw
Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanisms what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don't do the same for 'Time' magazine?: Mark Fowler, former FCC Chairman
We're not really going to get anywhere until we take the criminality out of drugs.: Secretary of State George P. Schultz, PBS, McNeil-Lehrer
News Hour, December 18, 1989
Democracy in America (bourgeois democracy) means nothing more than the domination of the majority over the minority. That is why Black people can cast votes all year long but if the majority is against us, we suffer.: Black Panther Party
... big thieves are ruthless in punishing little thieves.: Diogenes of Sinope
European intellectuals are so deeply indoctrinated that they cannot perceive that they are servants of power. They see themselves as courageous opponents of power who stand up for human rights and so on, a perception that is completely false.: Noam Chomsky
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded, and the amount of eccentricity in a society has been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.: Samuel Adams (1722-1803)
How fortunate for leaders, that the masses do not think.: Adolf Hitler
Why are people starving? Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes. Therefore the people are starving.: Lao Tzu
Why are the people rebellious? Because the rulers interfere too much. Therefore they are rebellious.: Lao Tzu
The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be.: Lao Tzu
The more rules and regulations, The more thieves and robbers.: Lao Tzu
Therefore, The sage does nothing and people govern themselves, Provokes no one and people are peaceful, Does not interfere and people prosper, Is without desire and people fulfill themselves. The more people are controlled, the less contented they become. But when will leaders understand the significance of this?: Lao Tzu
Liberty is the Mother, not the Daughter of Order.: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it.: Peter Kropotkin, Law and Authority
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins ... Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.: Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.: George Bernard Shaw
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.: George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.: George Bernard Shaw
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.: George Bernard Shaw (1944), Everybody's Political What's What? ch. 30
Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.: George Bernard Shaw
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.: George Bernard Shaw
Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that oour globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others. The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course ...: Emma Goldman
Patriotism: A Menace To Liberty
Anarchism and Other Essays
Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.: George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance (1914) p. 85
Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.: George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) `Maxims for Revolutionists: The Golden Rule'
If you strike a child take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.: George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) `Maxims for Revolutionists: How to Beat Children'
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.: George Bernard Shaw
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.: George Bernard Shaw
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.: George Bernard Shaw
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.: Gandhi
One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman.: Gandhi
The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form.: Gandhi
Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.: Albert Einstein
My body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm ... it is I who suffers, not the state.: Mark Twain
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.: George Orwell
Possible things are what the powerful do and what the weak yield to.: Thucydides
We both alike know that in the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where there is equal power to enforce it, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.: Thucydides
All state organizations resist the individual's attempt to control any part of our lives, whether it's physical or neurological, through the medical monopoly.: Timothy Leary, Mavericks of the Mind
In a civil society, citizens make the decisions affecting their lives for themselves. In a political society, government officials make many or even most of those decisions for citizens. The citizen's judgment about what is in his or her own best interest is supplanted by the judgment of others, who may not have the citizen's best interests at heart - or even know what those best interests are.: David Bardallis
All political movements are basically anti-creative -- since a political movement is a form of war.: William S. Burroughs
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.: (?)
Accentuate the negative!: Professor Bernardo de la Paz,
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
What we have in this country is socialism for the rich, and free enterprise for the poor.: Gore Vidal
The people never give up their liberty but under some delusion.: Edmund Burke, 1784
Every government program or law eventually requires another program or law to try to make it work. And when that followup program or law doesn't work either, the politicians expand it even further, adding more rules, penalties, surveillance and bureaucrats to administer it.: Gary Snyder, Chairman of the Manhattan Libertarian Party.
Ever notice that when freedom fails, politicians use that failure to justify abandoning freedom, but when the state fails, politicians use the failure to justify expanding the state?: Gary Snyder, Chairman of the Manhattan Libertarian Party.
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them.: Albert Einstein
If Stalin ever told me to urinate, I'm not sure I'd be able to.: Phil Donahue
These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.: Groucho Marx
One should respect public opinion insofar as it is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.: Bertrand Russell
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.: Howard Aiken
1935 will go down in History! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient and the world will follow our lead to the future!: Adolf Hitler, prior to confiscating all civilian firearms.
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.: David Hume
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.: John Gilmore
Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better.: Edgar W. Howe
A little kindness from person to person is better than a vast love for all humankind.: Richard Dehmel
It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.: Charles A. Beard
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or to impede their efforts to obtain it.: John Stuart Mill
When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence.: Gary Lloyd
Without using street language, how do you describe those who make a good living by fervently clinging to failed ideas that have killed thousands of people?: James Ostrowski
It is the Nature of Power to be ever encroaching, and converting every extraordinary Power, granted at particular Times, and upon particular Occasions, into an ordinary Power, to be used at all Times, and when there is no Occasion, nor does it ever part willingly with any Advantage....: "Cato's Letters"
It is sure that the workers can never permanently secure themselves in the control of their products except through the method of Liberty; but it is almost equally sure that, unless they are shown what Liberty will do for them in this respect, they will try every other method before they try Liberty.: Benjamin Tucker
"Conservatives want to be your daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do. Liberals want to be your mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose. Libertarians want to treat you as an adult.": some anonymous libertarian
A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.: L. Neil Smith
To complain that a free economy favors the rich is like complaining that free speech favors the eloquent.: Joseph Sobran
"Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?": George Carlin
Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.: Justice Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Courte,
Lawrence versus Texas [sodomy laws]
The Democrats cry, "The emperor should subsidize the poor!", Republicans argue, "No, the emperor should subsidize the rich!", Libertarians respond, "The emperor wears no clothes", while Terra Librans ask, "Why do they call that naked man emperor?": Craig Green, Grateful Slave
The exercise of freedom trumps the discomforts of novelty.: Susan Lee
The health of the state and the health of civilization are mutually exclusive concepts. Too bad such thinking can't be written into a country song.: Christopher Westley, Ph.D.,
Terrorism and the Moral Hazard
Society’s tastes in food, music, sports, and other things are equally transient. So, too, is what society deems proper and improper. For this reason alone, it is foolish for any generation to seek legislation to codify what it considers proper. Doing so imposes on future generations the tastes of their predecessors.: Jon Sanders,
The Tyranny of the Proper
Many Europeans see us as heartless and uncaring because we don't expect Uncle Sam to coddle us from cradle to grave.: Lawrence W. Reed
One does not encourage "responsibility" by forcibly restricting the range of people's authority over their own lives.: Butler Shaffer
Juries regularly convict citizens of various victimless crimes such as drug possession, gun possession, money possession (tax evasion) and free trade (smuggling).: James Ostrowski, What's Wrong with Juries
... juries are now packed with people who make a living from government work or depend on the government for much or all of their income. Expect no sympathy from such jurors in your tax evasion trial. You're what's for dinner.: James Ostrowski, What's Wrong with Juries
Everybody has asked the question ... "What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!: Frederick Douglass, "What the Black Man Wants"
... it is comfortless only to be able to work for one's own petty glory, when one has imagined for a while that one was working for the public good.: Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.: Arthur C. Clarke
Core principles contain within them the power to slice through billions of other words based on trivia and fallacy. Though we are outnumbered and outgunned on every front, we believe in the power of ideas to make a difference. This is why libertarians write.: Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty
Our age of word proliferation has taught us all to be discriminating readers. Some words matter more than others. If we care about the well-being of our children and their children, words in defense of liberty matter the most.: Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty
The longtime emphasis of the old liberal tradition with regard to war is this: even the victor loses.: Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty
We should pursue a world of minor imperfections rather than accept a world with major imperfections. But we would be wise not to demand political perfection. Messianic societies never attain perfection. They attain only tyranny.: Gary North
In China, the nation is moving in a capitalist direction while still calling it communism. In America, we are moving toward a communist system while calling it freedom. I am not saying I would rather live in China, given how unfree that country still remains. But I would rather live in a "communist" country that is free than a "free" country that is communist.: Steven Greenhut
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.: Clint Eastwood
Alas! monopoly is as fatal to science as it is to industry. Competition is as necessary a stimulant to economists as it is to the spinners of wool and cotton. In a word, socialist agitation must be given free reign if the French are to learn political economy.: Gustave de Molinari
We've all taken a vow of poverty. It begins, "I pledge allegience to the flag ...": L. Neil Smith, "The Tyranny of Democracy"
As an individualist, it's hard for me to see even one percent as insignificant, especially since that one percent always seems to include me.: L. Neil Smith, "The Tyranny of Democracy"
Rights aren't additive. Systems which assume that they are labor under the false and dangerous assumption that two people have more rights than one.: L. Neil Smith, "The Tyranny of Democracy"
For our purposes, Utopia might just be a place where people look forward to getting up in the morning.: L. Neil Smith, Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision
Heaven is being able to fire a rifle in any direction from my front porch & not hit anyone but trespassers.: L. Neil Smith, Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision
In the absence of laws against duelling, people will be more polite to each other, less inclined to offer unwanted advice. Either that or, thanks to natural selection, they'll soon have faster reflexes.: L. Neil Smith, Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision
Those who commit irrevocable murder will suffer the cruelest punishment of all: exile to a place where there's a government!: L. Neil Smith, Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision
Those few leftists who still believe in a static notion of how things ought to be, which they're willing to impose at bayonet-point, work their butts off making society dull & boring.: L. Neil Smith, Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision
But perhaps there never will be any libertarian talk radio. The left wing socialists own television, where they communicate in pretty pictographs and can emote to their bleeding hearts' content -- instead of offering ideas and logical argument. The right wing socialists own radio, the "Theater of the Mind". It's the internet, in many ways, the city of the future, that belongs to us.: L. Neil Smith
Prostitution involves sex and free enterprise. Which of these are you opposed to?: Joseph A. Hauptman
Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.: L. Neil Smith, The Atlanta Declaration
A system of liberty allows for the individual to be creative, productive, or spiritual on one's own terms, and encourages excellence and virtue. All forms of authoritarianism only exist at the expense of liberty. Yet the humanitarian do-gooders claim to strive for these very same goals. To understand the difference is crucial to the survival of a free society.: Ron Paul, "A Wise Consistency"
None of us, I suspect, really want to go back to some previous age, and encounter the brutality of nature and the rampant ignorance. The comforts and knowledge of our modern age have been a blessing and a legacy of the free market. But what we do want is the renewal of social power, of letting society evolve on its own terms rather than on the dictates of the officials of a central State.: James Leroy Wilson, "Social Power and the New Opposition"
The pursuit of coercive power over others will someday be universally recognized as a symptom of profound mental illness.: L. Neil Smith
Intellectual secession from the ruling regime is the first step to clear, creative thought.: Lew Rockwell, "Libertarianism and the Old Right"
At last, it is clear to anyone who cares about liberty that the real enemy is the ruling regime in government and academia, and that this ruling regime resides within our own borders.: Lew Rockwell, "Libertarianism and the Old Right"
Viewing Keynes as perhaps "the model liberal of the twentieth century" can only render an indispensable historical concept incoherent.: Ralph Raico, "Keynes and the Reds"
[S]uch crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft. (For while theft injures the extension of another?s personality, enslavement injures, and murder obliterates, that personality itself.): Murray N. Rothbard,
The Myth of National Defense
The libertarian's basic attitude toward war must then be: It is legitimate to use violence against criminals in defense of one's rights of person and property; it is completely impermissible to violate the rights of other innocent people. War, then, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals. We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion.: Murray N. Rothbard,
The Myth of National Defense
The absurdity ... is that egalitarians suppose that justice requires ignoring whether people deserve what they have and whether they are responsible for what they lack.: John Kekes, "The Absurdity of Egalitarianism"
It is not unjust that millionaires have less than billionaires.: John Kekes, "The Absurdity of Egalitarianism"
Libertarians are just promoting consistency to what most people already accept in general.: Terry Liberty Parker
Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We are expected, for example, to believe that the awful events of September 11, 2001 happened, not because we've been murdering people's children and distorting the survivors' lives in the Middle East for almost a century, but because they're all evil over there and envy our freedom -- as if we had that much left to envy.: L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
If we were only half as interested in liberty as in lust, we would not have half the problems we have.: Dr. Thomas Szasz
There are just two rules of governance in a free society: mind your own business; keep your hands to yourself.: P.J. O'Rourke, speech to the Cato Institute 1993
Without principles which you will adhere to and defend no matter how difficult it becomes (this being the definition of radicalism), you're like a ship without an anchor or rudder, adrift and lost.: L. Neil Smith, "Hollow woman"
That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.: The Virginia Declaration of Rights
It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say 'Enough!' Let our tribute to the September dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.: Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain
This is why the American Revolution was successful, because it wasn't one. Secession is inherently more stable than revolution. Funny how it's more reviled than revolution is.: Jesse Ogden, The Reluctant Anarchist
Boys and girls, please be wary of any sales pitch with only two choices, because it would seem this world, and any world, could hold many, many more.: Jesse Ogden's friend Ridgely
FEE's founder, the late Leonard E. Read, once warned of sinking in a sea of "buts." I believe in freedom and self-responsibility, "but" we need some minimum government social "safety net." I believe in the free market, "but" we need some limited regulation for the "public good." I believe in free trade, "but" we should have some form of protectionism for "essential" industries and jobs. Before you know it, Read warned, the case for freedom has been submerged in an ocean of exceptions.": Richard M. Ebeling, "What Friends of Freedom Can Learn From The Socialists"
If you consistently want individual liberty, you're a libertarian -- not a conservative.: Harry Browne, "Freedom First"
It is nonsense to make any pretence of reconciling the State and liberty.: Vladimir Lenin
There are definitely conservatives who are more pro-capitalism than pro-war, and liberals who are more pro-peace than pro-socialism. On the other hand, there are those on the Right who don't mind the welfare state, so long as it accompanies empire; and there are those on the Left who don't mind bombing a few countries and trashing the Fourth Amendment as long as the government also provides a free lunch. The first kind of leftists and rightists should be working together to oppose the second kind, who always manage to be the ones in control of the state and its two parties.: Anthony Gregory, "Down With Left and Right"
What is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.: George Mason, father of the Bill of Rights
Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.: Thomas Jefferson's commonplace book, 1774-1776, quoting from On Crimes and Punishment (1764) by criminologist Cesare Beccaria
The real triumph of civilization is the extent to which coercion is banished from human relations.: Anthony Gregory, The Failed War on Terrorism"
Libertarianism in One Sentence: Other people are not your property.: Roderick T. Long
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.: Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.: Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom... If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.: Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859)
There is only one cure for the evils that newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.: Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859)
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.: P.J. O'Rourke

May it be to the world... to assume the blessings and security of self-government.: Thomas Jefferson
The policy of the American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits.: Thomas Jefferson
No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government.: Thomas Jefferson
It is sinful and tyranical to force a man to pay for the promulgation of ideas with which he disagrees.: Thomas Jefferson
Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.: Thomas Jefferson (1799)
If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.: Thomas Jefferson
Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.: Thomas Jefferson
In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.: Thomas Jefferson
what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.: Thomas Jefferson
The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that ... it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.: Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.: Thomas Jefferson

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.: Patrick Henry, Virginia's Ratification convention, 1788
The great and direct end of government is liberty. Secure our liberties and privileges, and the end of government is answered. If this be not effectively done, government is an evil.: Patrick Henry, speech against the U.S. Constitution, June 25, 1788
If this be treason, make the most of it!: Patrick Henry
Congress, by the power of taxation, by that of raising an army, and by their control over the militia, have the sword in one hand, and the purse in the other. Shall we be safe without either?: Patrick Henry warning of the dangers of a standing army in the course of his trenchant and prophetic attack on the proposed U.S. Constitution in the Virginia ratifying convention.

History is nothing more than the behind of the present.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
The horrible truth about the War between the States is that it ended with many more individuals enslaved than when it began. Before the war, most Americans were free. They owned their own lives. But by the time it ended, everybody was the property of the state. Men were nothing but replaceable parts in the machinery of war. Women were nothing but factories to replace them. And the government could take your life -- or anything else it wanted -- any time it wanted, for any reason it cared to offer.: L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
If you study the domestic policies of the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administrations, and compare them with the policies of Adolf Hitler and his mentor, Benito Mussolini, you will eventually come -- however reluctantly -- to the conclusion that World War II was not a conflict between fascism and something else, as advertised, but a conflict between competing brands of fascism.: L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
I did learn to see through government lies -- "as through a glass darkly" --by taking the number of American B52 bombers the North Vietnamese claimed they had shot down every month, and the smaller number the American government admitted to, and averaging them. After the war, it turned out that my method was correct, within one or two percent.: L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
What is history? History is a selective recreation of the events of the past, according to a historian's premises regarding what is important and his judgment concerning the nature of causality in human action. This selectivity is a most important aspect of history, and it is this alone which prevents history from becoming a random chronicling of events. And since this selectivity is necessary to history, the only remaining question is whether or not such judgments will be made explicitly or implicitly, with full knowledge of what one considers to be important and why, or without such awareness.: Roy Childs, "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism"
A popular philosophical doctrine holds that the methodology of history is entirely different from the methodology of other sciences. Yet fundamentally the methodology of all sciences is the same -- logic.: Roy Childs, "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism"
Under the Nuremburg standards, Lincoln would have been executed as a war criminal.: Paul Craig Roberts
Zorroastrologism was founded by Zorro. This was a duelist religion.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of huge triangular cubes. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Solomom had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
The Boston Tea Party was held at Pearl Harbor.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Christianity was just another mystery cult until Jesus was born.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
During the Dark Ages it was mostly dark.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Spartacus led a slave rebellion in ancient Rome and then appeared in a movie about it later.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Satan Husane invaided Kiwi and Sandy Arabia.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Judyism had one big God named Yahoo.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Plato invented reality. He was teacher to Harris Tottle, author of The Republicans.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Under the constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him.... After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn when the apples are falling off the trees.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men.: Dribbleglass.com: Revisionist History
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what has worked with what sounded good. In area after area -- crime, education, housing, race relations -- the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.: Thomas Sowell

"You must accept human liberty whole or entire, or you must give up all cogency of reasoning by which to defend any part of it.": Auberon Herbert
Address on the Choices between Personal Freedom and State Protection, 1880
"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
Address on the Choices between Personal Freedom and State Protection, 1880
"Force rests on no moral foundations; you cannot justify it; it rests on no moral basis; you cannot reconcile it with reason and conscience and the higher nature of men.": Auberon Herbert
A Plea for Voluntaryism, 1908
"Between liberty and compulsory taxation there is no possible reconciliation.": Auberon Herbert
A Plea for Voluntaryism, 1908
"Destroy the rights of property, and you will also destroy both the material and the moral foundations of liberty. To all men and women, rich and poor, belong their own faculties, and as a consequence, equally belongs to them all that they can honestly gain in free and open competition, through the exercise of those faculties": Auberon Herbert
A Plea for Voluntaryism, 1908
"Destroy the rights of property, and you will also destroy both the material and the moral foundations of liberty. To all men and women, rich and poor, belong their own faculties, and as a consequence, equally belongs to them all that they can honestly gain in free and open competition, through the exercise of those faculties": Auberon Herbert
The Principles of Voluntaryism and Free Life, 1887
"The nature of man is indivisible; you cannot cut him across, and give one share of him to the state and leave the other for himself.": Auberon Herbert
The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885
"There is no profession which seems to me to be greater or nobler in itself that that which is concerned with human healing, but I am convinced that its interests cannot and will not coincide with those of society, so long as any legal power or any kind of monopoly is left in its hands.": Auberon Herbert
The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885
"Dynamite is not opposed to government; it is, on the contrary, government in its most intensified and concentrated form.": Auberon Herbert
The Ethics of Dynamite, 1894
"There can be no true condition of rest in society, there can be no perfect friendliness amongst men who differ in opinions, as long as either you or I can use our neighbour and his resources for the furtherance of our ideas and against his own.": Auberon Herbert
"Every form of socialism only represents the dominant faction - that and nothing more.": Auberon Herbert
"the socialist is under the unhappy destiny of having to plead for an impossible creed - a creed founded on Old World reactionary and superstitious ideas, that are only waiting half-alive to be decently buried forever by the race that has suffered so much and so long for them . . . ": Auberon Herbert

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.: Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)

Politics gives the habit of butting into other people’s business an aura of respectability...: Cat Farmer
What new class of criminal will the next wave of political reforms create? What legal behavior will next be classified as criminal for the sake of public health or national security? Whose standards will decide what is crime, and what defines freedom? It's absurd to make such a stink about secondhand smoke and ignore the more deadly, offensive, and ubiquitous effects of secondhand politics.: Cat Farmer
There is no minimum age to take up the foul habit of polluting other people's lives with the odor of sensibilities run amok. Kids may not be able to vote, but they certainly get involved in politics and are often encouraged to do so. Where's the outrage over seducing young minds into the vile and addictive habit of minding everyone else's business?: Cat Farmer
Did you know that politics is the leading cause of war? That politics probably kills more people worldwide than smoking, every year? Do you want your kids taking up such a nasty habit, especially at a tender age? While you're warning them about the dangers of drugs, sex, and alcohol, toss in a word of caution about politics.: Cat Farmer
He who loves peace has already overcome the enemy in his own heart...: Cat Farmer
To protect the unwitting consumer from unscrupulous big business, small business must henceforth be witlessly nipped in the bud.: Cat Farmer
Alas! The priceless may be pawned for a pittance, and the shame is, the purchaser rarely esteems the priceless higher than the pittance he paid for it. Such is politics ... the vote that meant so much to the voter, pawned at the poll booth; perhaps the voter would have held on to it, had he recognized its value. That vote, withheld, might have counted: while the vote that was cast -- like a favor, once granted too readily -- is soon forgotten, and courted no longer.: Cat Farmer
Government is the mechanism by which you mind my business and I mind yours.: Cat Farmer
We even find ourselves mysteriously bamboozled into supporting the absurd pretense that political participation has something to do with self-government. It has nothing to do with self-government in reality, and everything to do with not being able to pinpoint who in fact is really governing us, or to what end. Are we the stooges of a liberal media, or a conservative agenda gone out to eat grass? Or perhaps they really are our stooges, as the theory goes: Wouldn't it be more practical to drop the middlemen and self-govern?: Cat Farmer
Even if a Restraining Order ever did any good, who is going to issue one against the government?: Cat Farmer
Anarchism is my declaration of peace with you. It is a repudiation of the use of coercive power to achieve my own ends, or to abet the domination of any man by his fellows, or over his fellows.: Cat Farmer
Good intentions are no excuse for making prisoners and hostages of people who have less political clout than you do.: Cat Farmer
Anarchism is my statement of intention to mind my own business, and not to interest myself in yours beyond what is welcome, mannerly, and appropriate to our relationship, because I expect the same courtesy from you. We will only care about each other when our relationship is peaceful, and it is not a peaceful act to care to the extent of violating another person's boundaries.: Cat Farmer
If you honestly value diversity, yet believe that it must be administered or doled out by a central authority, you anticipate that the one thing that is most capable of killing diversity, and also has the best incentive to destroy it, will magically act to preserve it.: Cat Farmer
Giving diversity a limited range of acceptable ways in which it can manifest doesn't honor it any more than protest zones honor the right to free speech; that's just another way to quarantine the healthy elements of society against infecting the diseased ones.: Cat Farmer
There are good drugs and bad drugs. Good drugs are the ones that some authority wants you to take. Bad drugs are the ones some authority thinks you shouldn't take.: Cat Farmer
It's your body, but the public health is at stake. The public can deprive individual bodies of medical freedom to protect the well being of the public as a "collective body.: Cat Farmer
It is desirable to take rights away from everyone as individuals, so that we may exercise rights collectively on behalf of everyone's common welfare. By this process, the ability to exercise those rights ends up in the hands of a few people who thereby acquire power over the many, but this isn't nascent tyranny: It's political representation.: Cat Farmer
Since government tramples by and for (and on) the people, no individual is accountable for it or has recourse against it. Everyone may stomp on everyone else with impunity via politics ...: Cat Farmer
God, of course, would heartily approve of our government; after all, He created the Kudzu vine, too.: Cat Farmer
The answer to problems created by coercive government is always more government.: Cat Farmer
Do not pinch yourself: every one will say ouch, now that we've become a "collective body.": Cat Farmer
When the public has gained rights, the individual has lost them.: Cat Farmer
People who presume so far as to take on responsibility for anyone other than their own dependents have exchanged the principle of personal obligation for the prospect of political entitlement.: Cat Farmer
Church and state will never be entirely separate, because they are fraternal twins.: Cat Farmer
Fewer laws to break result in fewer criminals: more laws to break result in more crime. Laws are a leading preventable cause of crime; hence, one suspects, the apt term "criminal law.": Cat Farmer
Does electing a government to kill, steal, lie, or envy in one's stead absolve one of responsibility for aggression?: Cat Farmer
Am I government until proven individual, or individual until proven government? I plead individual.: Cat Farmer
A privileged class of scofflaws engineers laws. A vast, ever expanding assembly line of scofflaws is the product of laws.: Cat Farmer
The manufacture of criminals is an example of profit motive at its most cynical; however profitable a crime industry may be for the state, it puts a terrible social and economic burden upon the people.: Cat Farmer
The more laws, the less justice administered by them; the more regulations, the more burdensome the apparatus of state becomes to maintain.: Cat Farmer
The more criminals produced by the (so-called) "Justice System," the more dangerous society becomes; the once harmless pothead may not be so harmless after he's done fifteen years in federal prison, where he may trade in his peace pipe for brass knuckles, courtesy of the eminently insensible "War on (some) Drugs.": Cat Farmer
Laws are the primary means by which a minority may control a majority, because the enforcement of law rationalizes coercion.: Cat Farmer
The law creates criminals by declaring actions illegal.: Cat Farmer
If society is over-run by criminals, perhaps more scrutiny is warranted regarding the process by which crime is defined, and therefore produced.: Cat Farmer
Fewer crimes will result in fewer criminals.: Cat Farmer
Call a habit you don't like a crying shame; not a crime.: Cat Farmer
It may be your unpopular habit that leaves you clamped in the vice-grips of law tomorrow.: Cat Farmer
New laws are constantly created to address problems caused by previous laws. One bad law begets another, and another, and another.: Cat Farmer
A homeowner who has repeatedly painted his house without stripping down past layers first will understand the consequence of adding layers of fresh laws when the old ones were flaking and should have been stripped.: Cat Farmer
an ostensibly intended function of law was to protect the individual's rights against invasion. When the law does precisely what it claimed to prevent, it is lawlessness; it's become malicious, not judicious.: Cat Farmer
Once passed, laws regarding private behavior are a master key into the safest of sanctuaries.: Cat Farmer
If you don't want to live in a society of criminals, don't advocate for capricious laws against things that people are going to do or own anyway.: Cat Farmer
It's the law that makes the jailbird, not the jailbird that makes the law.: Cat Farmer
Regulations are the prime weapon of social engineers (or behavior modifiers, as you prefer): construct a cage quietly around the lab rats; then the white coats come out of the closet. Let the experiments begin. Life as the subject of someone else's study isn't pretty; object now.: Cat Farmer
A right that is assumed contrary to just principles is privilege; it's absurd to agitate for the rights of the under-privileged unless you first renounce privilege in favor of justice.: Cat Farmer
Privilege is political power, and political power has one object: shedding darkness into the light.: Cat Farmer
When people are not united in respect for each other's rights, they are easily divided into countless interest groups pulling against each other, and soon fall into political mayhem.: Cat Farmer
Laws are not to be confused with Justice.: Cat Farmer
A society that honors justice will not require an ever-growing volume of laws to address injustice.: Cat Farmer
Justice does not deal in coercive action; it measures corrective response.: Cat Farmer
Justice and Liberty are both wallflowers now; the Law has forgotten who it brung to the dance and is doing the two-step with Tyranny, and Uncle Sam has gone carousing with Privilege.: Cat Farmer
What healthy cell can successfully plead innocent in the court of the cancer?: Cat Farmer
Let people talk and act as they please; I must be a speed bump on the road to empire, and I must keep my honor.: Cat Farmer
If my concept of "anarchy" roughly translates to "democracy" in someone else's mind, and their "democracy" translates to "tyranny" in mine, relying on those terms fails to communicate useful meaning, and consulting dictionaries doesn't resolve issues of differing perception or subjective interpretation.: Cat Farmer
It's unsettling to realize that I might have far more in common with someone who speaks so eloquently against the free market and for democracy, than I do with someone whose language is closer to my own.: Cat Farmer
The "free market" (as I define it) is the ebb and flow of transactions that occur peacefully between people who have choices, and voices. It does not mean freedom for monstrous people-eating corporations to prey freely on a captive workforce; it means freedom for people to interact without coercion.: Cat Farmer
"Democracy," in my mind, denotes an involuntary and unsatisfactory arrangement in which government issues itself a limitless credit card, uses it to buy trouble, give generous gifts to its many dependents, gamble on impossible odds, donate to unworthy causes, and make irresponsible investments: literally debiting the taxpayer's account for "services" rendered.: Cat Farmer
The moment a word enters the political vocabulary, it becomes corrupt.: Cat Farmer
The thing that politics is least capable of doing is the one thing that makes a peaceful, harmonious and diverse society possible: agreeing to disagree, or laissez faire. Minding one's own business is rewarding when one is free to mind it; politics makes a public wading pool of everyone's business, and a morass out of everyone's private affairs. There simply is no right to privacy when everything is political: just as stagnant pools breed mosquitos, politics breeds busybodies.: Cat Farmer
People who experience political abuse tend to become future political abusers themselves, in an ongoing and socially devastating cycle.: Cat Farmer
The less your neighbors' politics can control you, the less it matters what they believe.: Cat Farmer
Wars on drugs, poverty, illiteracy, homelessness, deviance, intolerance, terrorism; wars between sexes, wars between races and religions, wars to acquire peace, wars to vanquish hate or destroy evil.... What greater evil could exist than war itself? Why use the greatest evil to rid the world of lesser ones?: Cat Farmer
The men who would govern us are pros at cons to deprive us of voluntary divisions of labor, setting up fines, licenses, regulatory agencies and even prohibitions to serve as "tollbooths" between persons A and B. First go get in line to pay the man at window C.: Cat Farmer
Some time ago I read an article about a city that spent considerably more to install and maintain parking meters than the meters took in ... a few meter maid jobs created, at what cost to local businesses? No job is too small for government to create, and no price too large to stick taxpayers with.: Cat Farmer
Petty tyrant jobs entail enforcement of rules: you can identify a petty tyrant by heavy reliance on variations of the statement "I don't make the rules, it's just my job to enforce them.": Cat Farmer
Unlimited liberty frightens people, so administrative and petty tyrant jobs serve to ensure our safety from the bogeyman of limitless liberty.: Cat Farmer
A state that overtaxes labor and rewards laziness only hastens its own demise, and people who blame laziness on human nature only justify servitude to the state.: Cat Farmer
Self-interest opposes laziness as vehemently as the state opposes self-interest.: Cat Farmer
A free market is the aggregate product of choices that free individuals take responsibility for. A government is the compiled result of discarded choices that people refused to take individual responsibility for and/or denied their neighbors liberty to take responsibility for. A free market is the antithesis of centralized government. Politician, govern thyself.: Cat Farmer
Separation of Church and State seems like a linguistic shell game unless that means bona fide separation of ideology from the force to impose ideological uniformity.: Cat Farmer
A dragon in a dress is still a dragon, and a State with the power to impose ideology is simply a Church operating under a military alias.: Cat Farmer
The State has no incentive to protect the independence of the individual, since it has no power without dependents to justify its protective authority.: Cat Farmer
I object to the idea of making a sport of social dominance - in such a game, the only thing I find less palatable than playing for the losing team is playing for the winning team, and considering the options it suits me best not to play at all or cheer for either side.: Cat Farmer
The whole attitude underlying partisan politics is that freedoms must not be equal; no one gains unless someone else loses. Something seems very wrong to me with the picture of winners who celebrate political victory in the full knowledge that it comes at the expense of both liberty and equality of some, for the benefit of others.: Cat Farmer
Go ahead and give me hell for not voting for my idea of heaven, but don't tell me to "vote my conscience" when it told me not to vote. Vote your conscience, but mind your own politics - my voting is not your affair, and my conscience does not take dictation from yours.: Cat Farmer
Maybe he'll clap when his "overseers" come for everyone he disagrees with, but who will clap when it's his turn? That old picture of Nero fiddling while Rome burned insists on doing a flip-flop in my mind... what if Nero had burned while Rome was fiddling? Are fiddles on Mr. S's no-buy list too? All hail fiddle rights, they're safe as long as they're in Nero's hands...? Hail no!: Cat Farmer
Hail no!: Cat Farmer

Who knows what cosmic screen saver pattern we're making: from the right distance.: Paul Knatz
I was moved by it: and I resented it. Fascinated silence from the circle. They showed the nice Edleweiss Austrians, Yay, and the brutish Nazis, Boo. I felt like my reflexes had been accurately mapped and were being meticulously exploited in an utterly meaningless exercise of mastery. No learning was taking place. Neither Hollywood nor I risked anything.: Paul Knatz on The Sound of Music
Those who see the Institutions' ass are beneath the Institutions' notice.: Paul Knatz
People planning to conquer the world always have the size wrong: radically, fatally wrong. The size, the scope, they always have everything important wrong.: Paul Knatz
To be a lawyer you have to fail a morality test; to write for the media you have to fail English and logic.: Paul Knatz
Every time the citizen goes to the Bureaucracy, there's a different bureaucrat. Bureacrat2 has no knowledge of what you said to Bureaucrat1 (and if he does, the Bureaucracy can substitute Bureaucrat3, Bureaucrat4 ....) So only the Bureaucracy's records count. The citizens' experience gets erased again and again.: Paul Knatz
.. how easy civilization finds it to be honest about the politics and society of three or four generations ago, where no one can sue or be sued, no one left alive to defend or deny. That's why it's a good thing empires don't last: so that other empires can talk bad about them.: Paul Knatz
Theory is the highest form of knowledge a sentient creature can aspire to.: Paul Knatz
Myth is the only place most of us humans ever live.: Paul Knatz
As long as you've got the H-bombs, you can serve the devil and call him God.: Paul Knatz
I don't believe there are any political solutions to our problems.: Paul Knatz
In theory authority can be identified with truth and the right; in practice, authority is indistinguishable from power.: Paul Knatz
Kleptocracy is the last word in having the last word.: Paul Knatz
Nature already contains all the laws either life or the physical world (or God) can ever need.: Paul Knatz
Don't interfere should be our entire politics.: Paul Knatz
No government, no matter how dictatorial, can do much damage without the public as an active partner-in-crime.: Paul Knatz
...in order to be heard you first have to prove that you have nothing to say.: Paul Knatz
The school's advertised purpose is to educate. Schools are inefficient and incompetent as well as inappropriate for education. The school's actual purpose is to domesticate. There the schools shine. A kleptocracy that wants trained sheep for citizens really gets its money's worth from a school.: Paul Knatz
Kleptocratic society is set up so that those who commit the greatest crimes sit in judgment on those who didn't.: Paul Knatz
Is there any difference between a protection racket and a government?: Paul Knatz
Satan promised Eve things he didn't have to give or sell. Now governments promise us the same things.: Paul Knatz
The thieves, the street gang ... can take my freedom away. How is government different from a street gang?: Paul Knatz
Dogma must die.: Paul Knatz
There is no knowledge; only belief. But of course some beliefs are better based than others.: Paul Knatz
Opinion which is in accord both with experience and theory is called knowledge.: Paul Knatz
Knowledge: belief in accord with both the best available facts and the best available theories.: Paul Knatz
The responsible parent trains its young to be independent; The pathological state trains the young it's kidnapped to stay dependent.: Paul Knatz
If success isn't an option, it's still best to try anyway.: Paul Knatz
Society: a synergy of conspiracies.: Paul Knatz
There's no deception like self-deception.: Paul Knatz
What's wrong with us cannot be brought up in polite society.: Paul Knatz
Received wisdom is immune to learning. Experience doesn't count wherever authority is enthroned.: Paul Knatz
There are no paths to truth; only paths shown to avoid known errors.: Paul Knatz
"Sticks and stones may break my bones" but names are what we go to war over.: Paul Knatz
School is artificial scarcity, factitious expense.: Paul Knatz
How does one know what (meta) game(s) one is in? One Don't!: Paul Knatz
All have some ability to determine the truth. Some have a genius for it. All have some ability to deny the truth. Some have a genius for it.: Paul Knatz
The function of law is to protect the successful thefts of the past from present ambition.: Paul Knatz
People trust their governments to cheat on their behalf.: Paul Knatz
Standards are nice: there are so many to choose from.: Paul Knatz
We don't need sound reasoning: We're the good guys.: Paul Knatz
After the flood, universities will be filled with professors teaching arc-building.: Paul Knatz
How can there be "science" in a society where the "scientists" beg for funding from the illusionists?: Paul Knatz
The function of myth is to tell the truth: so simply, so blatantly, that no one gets it.: Paul Knatz
Too young to have a clue, we're sent to church where we're trained to say things that will become lies in time if they're not already lies at the time.: Paul Knatz
I was brought up to believe we were nice. I grew up believing that I am nice. Now I'm not at all sure. I've never been handed the power of life and death. Who knows what I'd do with it if I were. Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin might come to look puny compared to pk's potential devastations. If I did it at all, I'd want to kill in the billions. Genocide the genocides.: Paul Knatz
Has mankind ever seen anything more beautiful than the bomb? The awesome mushroom. More beautiful than God.: Paul Knatz
I'd like to kill everyone who is or ever has been a racist. I'd like to kill everyone who is or ever has been a religious bigot. I know, I know: then I'd have to kill myself too. That's OK. I'd do it.: Paul Knatz
We're programed to believe that there must be a solution: one we won't have to pay for. Real philosophy doesn't have a chance: against politics.: Paul Knatz
Monotheism is like socialism, rather socialism is like monotheism. Can't stand all those competing plans? Can't stand all those gods, all those taboos? Centralize! Put all your gods in one big basket. One god, one state, one committee, one leader, one plan. That anarchist rap works as well for theology as it does for politics. Politics is theology, just way retarded in time.: Paul Knatz
If I can get far far far enough into my own head, maybe God will leave me alone.: Paul Knatz
If government is always onshore, let's all go offshore.: Paul Knatz
Science can prove error, not truth. Plagiarism can be proved, originality cannot. Theft can be proved; not ownership. One could prove that the devil isn't God, God himself could not prove that God is God.: Paul Knatz
If you're going to be an idiot, which we all are, it helps to be a genius at it.: Paul Knatz

NATIONAL SECURITY IS THE CHIEF CAUSE OF NATIONAL INSECURITY!!!: Hagbard Celine
THOSE WHO EMPLOY SECRET POLICE MUST MONITOR THEM TO BE SURE THEY ARE NOT ACQUIRING TOO MUCH POWER.: Hagbard Celine
IN RUSSIA, THE GOVERNMENT IS TERRIFIED OF PAINTERS AND POETS!: Hagbard Celine
"IF THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T TRUST THE PEOPLE, WHY DOESN'T IT DISSOLVE THEM AND ELECT A NEW PEOPLE?": Hagbard Celine
COMMUNICATION IS POSSIBLE ONLY BETWEEN EQUALS.: Hagbard Celine
NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING, OR IF THEY DO, THEY ARE CAREFUL TO HIDE THE FACT!: Hagbard Celine

It is the Fundamentalism in any group, or any individual, that causes me alarm; and nobody's Fundamentalism alarms me as much as my own, whenever I spot a bit of it skulking around in the back rooms of my skull.: Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition
Dr. Leary, like Dr. Reich, went to prison. And now other researchers are forbidden by law to check or test his models.: Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition
Belief is an obsolete Aristotelian category.: Dr. Jack Sarfatti to Robert Anton Wilson, as quoted in The New Inquisition
I don't trust clergymen much, myself. Some of them are as dogmatic as some scientists.: Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition
Try to think, just for a moment ... Try. Thoughts are the one phenomenon still private in this world; they won't come around and arrest you at once. You have nothing to lose but mental chains. You might have a world of phsychological freedom ... to gain.: Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition
We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch.: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
Anti-Semitism is a complex aberration, of many facets and causes, but in its classic form (the "Jewish Bankers' Conspiracy") it simply holds that a hostile gene-pool controls the tickets for bio-security. Such paranoia is inevitable in a money economy; junkies have similar myths about who controls the supply of heroin.: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
Welfare-ism, socialism, totalitarianism, etc. represent attempts, in varying degrees of rationality and hysteria, to re-create the tribal bond by making the State stand-in for the gene-pool.: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
Mary Baker Eddy may have been exaggerating slightly when she said, "All illness is manifested fear;" but holistic medicine more and more recognizes that if that damned word "all" is replaced by a more tentative "most," Mrs. Eddy was close to the facts.: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
Thus, a genius is one who, by some internal process, breaks through to Circuit VII -- a minor neurological miracle loosely called "intuition" -- and comes back down to the third circuit with the capacity to paint a new semantic map, build a new model of experience. Needless to say, this is always a profound shock to those still trapped in the old robot-imprints, and is generally considered a threat to territory ...: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
Are the most important scientific ideas of 1997 going to be published in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN in 1997, or 2017?: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
It is sometimes mistakenly stated that there are no universal sexual taboos. This is not true. There is one omni-purpose taboo which exists in every tribe. That taboo stipulates that sexuality shall NOT be unregulated by the tribe.: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
"Give us the child until he is five, and we will have him for life," bragged some 18th Century Jesuit. The Jesuit order of that time, as Aldus Huxley later noted sardonically, educated Voltaire, Diderot, and the Marquis de Sade; obviously their techniques of brain-programming were not perfect.: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
It requires delicate neurological know-how to keep one's sense of humor in the secret police matrix.: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
It does not matter whether any or all of these "heretics" were right or wrong. Scientific truth is only determined after a generation or more of research; it is not determined by throwing the dissenters in prison or burning their books.: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
There is nothing rationally desirable that cannot be achieved sooner if rationality itself increases. This is virtually a tautology, but we must consider the corollary: Work to achieve Intelligence Intensification is work to achieve our other sane and worthwhile goals.: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.: Robert Anton Wilson
The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games ...: Robert Anton Wilson
It's hard to communicate with somebody when he thinks you're a diabolical mind-control agent and you're convinced that he's a little bit paranoid.: Robert Anton Wilson, Mavericks of the Mind
I believe everything admirable in the modern world results from the use of Argument by Experiment together with Argument by Logic (without making an Idol of either), whereas everything heinous and terrible results from the persistence of the older habits of Arguments by Authority, Intimidation, Self Interest and Legal Precedent, or the various forms of calling the other side sons of bitches.: Robert Anton Wilson

In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
But the libertarian sees no inconsistency in being "leftist" on some issues and "rightist" on others. On the contrary, he sees his own position as virtually the only consistent one, consistent on behalf of the liberty of every individual. For how can the leftist be opposed to the violence of war and conscription while at the same time supporting the violence of taxation and government control? And how can the rightist trumpet his devotion to private property and free enterprise while at the same time favoring war, conscription, and the outlawing of noninvasive activities and practices that he deems immoral? And how can the rightist favor a free market while seeing nothing amiss in the vast subsidies, distortions, and unproductive inefficiencies involved in the military-industrial complex?: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
Individualists have always been accused by their enemies of being "atomistic" -- of postulating that each individual lives in a kind of vacuum, thinking and choosing without relation to anyone else in society. This, however, is an authoritarian straw man; few, if any, individualists have ever been "atomists." On the contrary, it is evident that individuals always learn from each other, cooperate and interact with each other; and that this, too, is required for man's survival. But the point is that each individual makes the final choice of which influences to adopt and which to reject, or of which to adopt first and which afterwards. The libertarian welcomes the process of voluntary exchange and cooperation between freely acting individuals; what he abhors is the use of violence to cripple such voluntary cooperation and force someone to choose and act in ways different from what his own mind dictates.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
We have been told countless times by pundits and political scientists that the genius of America and of our party system is its lack of ideology and its "pragmatism" (a kind word for focusing solely on grabbing money and jobs from the hapless taxpayers).: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
Current free-market economics is all too rife with appeals to gradualism; with scorn for ethics, justice, and consistent principle; and with a willingness to abandon free-market principles at the drop of a cost-benefit hat. Hence, current free-market economics is generally envisioned by intellectuals as merely apologetics for a slightly modified status quo, and all too often such charges are correct.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the State among its hapless subjects.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
Take, for example, the institution of taxation, which statists have claimed is in some sense really "voluntary." Anyone who truly believes in the "voluntary" nature of taxation is invited to refuse to pay taxes and to see what then happens to him.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
There is no existing entity called "society"; there are only interacting individuals. To say that "society" should own land or any other property in common, then, must mean that a group of oligarchs -- in practice, government bureaucrats -- should own the property, and at the expense of expropriating the creator or the homesteader who had originally brought this product into existence.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
It so happens that the free-market economy, and the specialization and division of labor it implies, is by far the most productive form of economy known to man, and has been responsible for industrialization and for the modern economy on which civilization has been built. This is a fortunate utilitarian result of the free market, but it is not, to the libertarian, the prime reason for his support of this system. That prime reason is moral ...: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
The human right of a free press depends upon the human right of private property in newsprint.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
There is nothing sacrosanct about the majority; the lynch mob, too, is the majority in its own domain.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
We see clearly why the State needs the intellectuals; but why do the intellectuals need the State? Put simply, the intellectual's livelihood in the free market is generally none too secure; for the intellectual, like everyone else on the market, must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is characteristic of these masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual concerns. The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a warm, secure, and permanent berth in its apparatus, a secure income, and the panoply of prestige.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
If we add that the draftees owe their bodies and their lives, if necessary, to "society" or to "their country," then we must retort: Who is this "society" or this "country" that is being used as a talisman to justify enslavement? It is simply all individuals in the territorial area except the youths being conscripted. "Society" and "country" are in this case mythical abstractions that are being used to cloak the naked use of coercion to promote the interests of specific individuals.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
Any standing army, then, poses a standing threat to liberty. Its monopoly of coercive weapons, its modern tendency toward creating and supporting a "military-industrial complex" to supply that army, and last, but not least, as Patrick Henry notes, the taxing power to finance that army, pose a continuing threat of the army's perpetual expansion in size and power. Any tax-supported institution, of course, is opposed by the libertarian as coercive, but an army is uniquely menacing for its amassing and collecting into one set of hands the massive power of modern weaponry.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
Few people remember that the withholding system was only instituted during World War II and was supposed to be a wartime expedient. Like so many other features of State despotism, however, the wartime emergency measure soon became a hallowed part of the American system.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
Since sex is a uniquely private aspect of life, it is particularly intolerable that governments should presume to regulate and legislate sexual behavior, yet of course this has been one of the State's favorite pastimes.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
The irony, of course, is that by forcing men to be "moral" -- i.e., to act morally -- the conservative or liberal jailkeepers would in reality deprive men of the very possibility of being moral.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
But the long run is now here. We do not have to prophesy the ruinous effects of statism; they are here at every hand. Lord Keynes once scoffed at criticisms by free-market economists that his inflationist policies would be ruinous in the long run; in his famous reply, he chortled that "in the long run we are all dead." But now Keynes is dead and we are alive, living in his long run. The statist chickens have come home to roost.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
In the host of special interests using the political process to repress and loot the rest of us, the protectionists are among the most venerable. It is high time that we get them, once and for all, off our backs, and treat them with the righteous indignation they so richly deserve.: Murray Rothbard
While throughout Western history, intellectuals have formulated theories designed to check and limit State power, each State has been able to use its own intellectuals to turn those ideas around into further legitimations of its own advance of power.: Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
The existence of gold in the economy is a constant reminder of the poor quality of the government paper, and it always poses a threat to replace the paper as the country's money.: Murray N. Rothbard,
What Has Government Done to Our Money?
Even with the government giving all the backing of its prestige and its legal tender laws to its fiat paper, gold coins in the hands of the public will always be a permanent reproach and menace to the government's power over the country's money.: Murray N. Rothbard,
What Has Government Done to Our Money?
True to the virtual law that all innovations come from free individuals and no the state, the first coins were minted by private individuals and goldsmiths. In fact, when the government first began to monopolize the coinage, the royal coins bore the guarantees of private bankers, whom the public trusted far more, apparently, than they did the government.: Murray N. Rothbard,
What Has Government Done to Our Money?
It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science." But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.: Murray Rothbard
statistics cannot refute logic: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 2: Ten Great Economic Myths
No, the only sound cure for deficits is a simple but virtually unmentioned one: cut the federal budget. How and where? Anywhere and everywhere.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 2: Ten Great Economic Myths
People are contrary cusses whose behavior, thank goodness, cannot be forecast precisely in advance.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 2: Ten Great Economic Myths
The next time you are swayed by the jargon or seeming expertise of the economic forecaster, ask yourself this question: If he can really predict the future so well, why is he wasting his time putting out newsletters or doing consulting when he himself could be making trillions of dollars in the stock and commodity markets?: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 2: Ten Great Economic Myths
In media lingo, in short, "discussing" the issues means accepting the media's statist premises, and solemnly haggling over minute technicalities within those premises. If, for example, you say that national health insurance is tantamount to socialized medicine you are accused of using "scare words" and of not discussing The Issues. Anyone who thinks that socialism or collectivism is an important issue is quickly swept aside.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 3: Discussing The "Issues"
The hallmark of crackpot economics is an analysis that somehow leaves out prices, and talks only about such aggregates as income, spending, and employment.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 11: Keynesian Myths
We can have as much unemployment as we pay for.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 11: Keynesian Myths
Bad and discredited ideas, it seems, never die. Neither do they fade away. Instead, they keep turning up, like bad pennies or Godzilla in the old Japanese movies.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 34: Price Controls Are Back!
It is conventional among economists to be polite, to assume that economic fallacy is solely the result of intellectual error.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 36: Outlawing Jobs: The Minimum Wage, Once More
In the long run, economics triumphs over symbolism, hoopla, and radical chic.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 38: The Legacy of Cesar Chavez
Socialists used to argue that all they wish to do is to convert the entire economy to function like one huge Post Office. No socialist would dare argue that today, so much of a disgrace is the monopolized governmental Postal Service.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 39: Privitization
On the crucial principle that control always follows subsidy, the voucher scheme would extend government domination from the public schools to the as-yet more or less independent private schools.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 43: Chapter 43 Vouchers: What Went Wrong.
Once again, as in the case of the phony "free traders" pushing for NAFTA and GATT, it is important to look closely at what lies underneath the fair label of"free markets." Often, it's something else entirely.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 45: Eisnerizing Manassas
The "partnership of government and business" is a new term for an old, old condition. We often fail to realize that the point of much of Big Government is precisely to set up such "partnerships," for the benefit of both government and business, or rather, of certain business firms and groups that happen to be in political favor.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 51: Government-Business "Partnerships"
In our enthusiasms for privatization, by the way, we should stop and think whether we would want certain government functions to be privatized, and conducted efficiently. Would it really have been better, for example, if the Nazis had farmed out Auschwitz or Belsen to Krupp or I.G. Farben?: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 51: Government-Business "Partnerships"
The traditional tale is that a glaring problem arises, caused by the unchecked and selfish actions of capitalist greed. And that then a wise and far-sighted government agency, seeing deeply and having only the public interest at heart, steps in and corrects the failure, its sage regulations gently but firmly bending private actions to the common good.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 52: Airport Congestion: A Case of Market Failure?
Whenever economists see a shortage, they are trained to look immediately for the maximum price control below the free-market price.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 52: Airport Congestion: A Case of Market Failure?
Many people, and even some economists, believe that large, highly capitalized firms can always outcompete small ones. Nothing could be further from the truth. ... Small business can outcompete, and outinnovate, the giants.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 54: Competition at Work: Xerox at 25
Human progress and human freedom go hand in hand.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 54: Competition at Work: Xerox at 25
The crucial fallacy, then, of this economic elite, is to designate virtually every bit of government spending with the honorific label "investment." But on the contrary, government spending is not "investment" at all; it is simply money spent for the edification or the power of the unproductive ruling elite in the government. All government spending, far from deserving the term "investment," is in reality consumption spending by politicians and bureaucrats. Any increase in the government budget is therefore a push toward more consumption and less saving and investment; and the reverse is true for any cut in the budget.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 56: Are We Undertaxed?
In short, privatize the public sector, and the noteworthy squalor would rapidly disappear. And if anyone should prove skeptical, let's try it for a while. Let's privatize the government for, say, ten years, and see what happens; we can even call it a "Great Social Experiment," performed in the best interests of"value-free science." Any takers?: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 56: Are We Undertaxed?
One of the things that has kept the English economy from going totally down the tubes is that England, despite its cripplingly high income taxation, has no tax at all on capital gains.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 61: Flat Tax Or Flat Taxpayer?
Thatcherism is all too similar to Reaganism: free-market rhetoric masking statist content.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 62: Mrs. Thatcher's Poll Tax
The problem in almost all analyses of the new European Community is the usual conflation of State and society. Socially and economically, to the extent that the new Europe will be a vast free-trade and free-capital-investment area, this new order will be all to the good: expanding the division of labor, the productivity, and the living standards of all the participating nations. Unfortunately, the essence of the new Europe will not be its free-trade area, but a giant new State bureaucracy, headquartered in Strasbourg and Brussels, controlling, regulating, and "equalizing" tax rates everywhere by coercing the raising of taxes in low-tax countries.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 63: Exit The Iron Lady
The precedent has already been set: if it is proper and legitimate for President Bush and his administration to beg Japan, Germany, and other nations for funds for our military adventures in the Persian Gulf, why shouldn't they be forced, at least for one glorious year, to beg for funds from the American people, instead of wielding their usual bludgeon?: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 64: The Budget Crisi
The federal courts are appointed by the executive and confirmed by the legislature, and are therefore part and parcel of the government structure.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 65: The Balanced-budget Amendment Hoax
But isn't half a loaf better than none? ... Half a loaf is indeed better than none, but even worse than no loaf is an elaborate camouflage system that fools the public into thinking that a loaf exists where there is really none at all.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 65: The Balanced-budget Amendment Hoax
I am by no means a complete "contrarian," but I have one contrarian index to offer as a sound "leading indicator" of recession: every time establishment economists and financial writers trumpet the existence of a brave new world of permanent boom with no more recessions, I know that a big recession is just around the corner.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 67: Inflationary Recession, Once More
It is precisely because free markets and the pure gold standard lead inevitably to falling prices that monetarists and Keynesians alike call for fiat money.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 68: Deflation, Free or Compulsory
the market proves wiser than economists: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 74: Back to Fixed Exchange Rates
Governments, especially including the U.S. government, seem to be congenitally incapable of keeping their mitts off any part of the economy.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 75: The Cross of Fixed Exchange Rates
Like all definitions such as the yard, the ton, etc., the point of the definition was that, once set, it was fixed forever. Thus, for example, if, as was roughly the case in the nineteenth century, "the dollar" was defined as 1/20 of a gold ounce, "the pound" as 1/4 of a gold ounce, and "the French franc" as 1/100 of a gold ounce, the "exchange rates" were simply proportional gold weights of the various currency units, so that the pound would automatically be worth $5, the franc would automatically be worth 20 cents, etc.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 75: The Cross of Fixed Exchange Rates
Fluctuating fiat moneys, as the world has discovered once again, since 1971, are unsatisfactory. They cripple the advantages of international money and virtually return the world to barter. They fail to provide the check against inflation by governments and central banks once supplied by the stern necessity of redeeming their monetary issues in gold.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 75: The Cross of Fixed Exchange Rates
Like all other modern "free trade" agreements, NAFTA serves as a back-channel to international currency regulation and fixed exchange rates.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 75: The Cross of Fixed Exchange Rates
Fiat money by any name smells as sour.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 76: The Keynesian Dream
It would be heartening, however, if principled opposition to the Dream could also be mounted. For what the Keynesians want is no less than an internationally coordinated and controlled world-wide, paper-money inflation, a fine-tuned inflation that would proceed unchecked upon its merry way until, whoops!, it landed the entire world smack into the middle of the untold horrors of global runaway hyperinflation.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 76: The Keynesian Dream
monetary inflation is counterfeiting, plain and simple. As in counterfeiting, the creation of new money simply diverts resources from producers, who have gotten their money honestly, to the early recipients of the new money to the counterfeiters, and to those on whom they spend their money.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 76: The Keynesian Dream
Many free-market advocates wonder: why is it that I am a champion of free markets, privatization, and deregulation everywhere else, but not in the banking system? The answer should now be clear: Banking is not a legitimate industry, providing legitimate service, so long as it continues to be a system of fractional-reserve banking: that is, the fraudulent making of contracts that it is impossible to honor.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 78: Bank Crisis!
We now see why private enterprise works so badly in the deposit insurance business. For private enterprise only works in a business that is legitimate and useful, where needs are being fulfilled. It is impossible to "insure" a firm, even less so an industry, that is inherently insolvent. Fractional reserve banks, being inherently insolvent, are uninsurable.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 79: Anatomy Of The Bank Run
It would be instructive to see how many banks would survive if the massive governmental props were finally taken away.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 79: Anatomy Of The Bank Run
An industry that finds its assets unregulated while its liabilities are guaranteed by the federal government may be, in the short-run, at least, in a happy position; but it can in no sense be called an example of a free-enterprise industry.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 80: Q&A on the S&L Mess
In a genuine free-market economy, no one may exploit anyone else in order to acquire an ironclad guarantee against loss.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 80: Q&A on the S&L Mess
On the market, confidence stems from tried and tested consumer satisfaction with the product. The proclaimed fact that our banking system relies so massively on our "confidence" demonstrates that such confidence is sadly misplaced.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 84: The Mysterious Fed
The major point is that genuine free trade requires no negotiations, treaties, super-power creations, or presidential jetting abroad. All it requires is for the United States to cut tariffs and quotas, as well as taxes and regulations. Period. And yes, unilaterally. No other nations or governments need get into the act.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 86: "Free Trade" in Perspective
The major point is that genuine free trade requires no negotiations, treaties, super-power creations, or presidential jetting abroad. All it requires is for the United States to cut tariffs and quotas, as well as taxes and regulations. Period. And yes, unilaterally. No other nations or governments need get into the act.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 86: "Free Trade" in Perspective
The word "freedom," of course, is also a grabber, and so another way to gain adherents in an age that exalts rhetoric over substance is simply to call yourself or your proposal "free market" or "free trade." Labels are often enough to nab the suckers.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 87: The NAFTA Myth
The word "freedom," of course, is also a grabber, and so another way to gain adherents in an age that exalts rhetoric over substance is simply to call yourself or your proposal "free market" or "free trade." Labels are often enough to nab the suckers.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 87: The NAFTA Myth
And so, among champions of free trade, the label "North American Free Trade Agreement" (NAFTA) is supposed to command unquestioning assent. "But how can you be against free trade?" It's very easy. The folks who have brought us NAFTA and presume to call it "free trade" are the same people who call government spending "investment," taxes "contributions," and raising taxes "deficit reduction." Let us not forget that the Communists, too, used to call their system "freedom.": Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 87: The NAFTA Myth
The Establishment's concept of "free" trade, since World War II, is exports subsidized by the taxpayers.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 88: Is There Life After Nafta?
Whenever anyone talks about "fairness," the average American had better look to his wallet.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 89: "Fairness" And The Steel Steal Is There Life After Nafta?
"Dumping" can harm only the dumper; it always benefits the dumpee.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 89: "Fairness" And The Steel Steal Is There Life After Nafta?
As on so many other occasions, doing good for becomes doing harm to.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 90: the Crusade Against South Africa
The profound flaw is an equivocation on the word "we," a collective term covering a multitude of sins.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 90: the Crusade Against South Africa
Free-market capitalism is a marvelous antidote for racism.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 90: the Crusade Against South Africa
In a free market, employers who refuse to hire productive black workers are hurting their own profits and the competitive position of their own company. It is only when the state steps in that the government can socialize the costs of racism and establish an apartheid system.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 90: the Crusade Against South Africa
The growth of capitalism in South Africa will do far more to end apartheid than the futile and counterproductive grandstanding of American liberals.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 90: the Crusade Against South Africa
In fact, pricing on the market is not an act of will by sellers. Businessmen do not determine their selling prices on the basis of whether they feel greedy or "responsible" that morning. The entire apparatus of economic theory, built up over centuries, is devoted to demonstrating a great truth: that prices are set only by the demand of purchasers (how much of a good or service purchasers will buy at any given price), and by the supply or stock of the good.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 92: Oil Prices Again
Imposing controls to stop a price increase is like trying to cure a fever by pushing down the mercury on a thermometer. They work on the symptoms instead of the causes.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 92: Oil Prices Again
To paraphrase a famous statement of Dos Passos ("all right, we are two nations"): every country is really two nations, not one. From one nation--the people interacting voluntarily, in families, churches, science, culture, and the market economy--all blessings flow. The "second nation"--the State--produces nothing; it acts as a parasitic blight upon the first, productive nation: taxing, looting, inflating, controlling, propagandizing, murdering.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 97: Should We Bail out Gorby?
If we tighten up ethics and crack down on graft and conflict of interest, the cry goes, how will we attract good people into government? The short answer, of course, is that we will indeed attract fewer crooks and grafters, but one wonders why this is something to complain about.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 100: The Freedom Revolution
We are also seeing the complete vindication of the point that Hayek shook the world with in the Road to Serfdom. Writing during World War II when socialism seemed inevitable everywhere, Hayek warned that, in the long run, political and economic freedom go hand in hand. In particular, that "democratic socialism" is a contradiction in terms. A socialist economy will inevitably be dictatorial.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 100: The Freedom Revolution
The unarmed Chinese masses in Beijing met their fate because they made the great mistake of trusting their government. They kept repeating again and again: "The People's Army cannot fire on the people." They ached for freedom, but they still remained seduced by the Communist con-game that the "government is the people." Every Chinese has now had the terrible lesson of the blood of thousands of brave young innocents engraved in their hearts: "The government is never the people," even if it calls itself "the people's government.": Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 100: The Freedom Revolution
what consolation is it for a consumer to have the price of an item be cheap if he or she can't find it? Better to have a bar of soap cost ten rubles and be available than to cost two rubles and never appear.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 102: A Radical Prescription For the Socialist Bloc
In addition, the East European countries are starved for capital to develop their economy, and capital will only be supplied, whether by domestic savers or by foreign investors, when: (1) there is a genuine stock market, a market in shares of ownership titles to assets; and (2) the currency is genuinely convertible into hard currencies.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 102: A Radical Prescription For the Socialist Bloc
Every war in American history has been the occasion for a Great Leap Forward in the power of the State, a leap which, at best, could only be partly rolled back after the war.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 104: The Glorious Postwar World
Particularly dangerous for an acceleration of statism are successful wars; while Korea and Vietnam led to an intensification of State power, they did not generate the lifelong nostalgia, the eagerness to recapture the glory days, of a successful war.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 104: The Glorious Postwar World
The ideology common to the ruling elites of both parties is Welfarist, Corporatist Statism; whether it's called corporate "liberalism" or "conservatism" is largely a question of nuance and esthetics. Essentially, the corporate and media elites have long been engaging in a shell game in which the American public are the suckers. When the public is fed up with one party, the elites offer up an alleged alternative that only turns out to more of the same.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 105: The Revolution Comes Home
Those who stress the importance of ideas in society and politics tend to concentrate solely on the long-run, on future generations. All that is true and important and must never be forgotten. But ideas are not only for the ages; they are vitally important in the here-and-now. In times of revolutionary ferment in particular, social and political change tends to be sudden and swift.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Postscript: The November Revolution . . . and What to Do about it
If government sets itself up as the guardian of the international meter or the standard yard or pound, there is no economic incentive for it to betray its trust and change the definition. For the Bureau of Standards to announce suddenly that 1 pound is now equal to 14 instead of 16 ounces would make no sense whatever. There is, however, all too much of an economic incentive for governments to change, especially to lighten, the definition of the currency unit; say, to change the definition of the pound sterling from 16 to 14 ounces of silver. This profitable process of the government's repeatedly lightening the number of ounces or grams in the same monetary unit is called debasement.: Murray N. Rothbard,
The Mystery of Banking
Free banking, then, will inevitably be a regime of hard money and virtually no inflation. In contrast, the essential purpose of central banking is to use government privilege to remove the limitations placed by free banking on monetary and bank credit inflation.: Murray N. Rothbard,
The Mystery of Banking
There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.: Murray N. Rothbard
... every supply of money is optimal. Once a market in a money is established, there is no longer a need for more money. That is really the key point.: Murray N. Rothbard
... there are many things demanded on the market that are also crimes. There may be a demand for killing redheads. And there is certainly a demand for government loot. What's so great about market demand? If it is not within a framework of non-aggression, there will always be a demand for fraud and theft.: Murray N. Rothbard
The free bankers accept a kind of David Friedmanite anarchism, where there is no law, only people engaging in exchange and buying people out. If you have a group that wants to kill redheads, the redheads will have to buy them off if they value their hair. I think this is monstrous, the kind of anarchism that would indeed be chaos. Just because there is a demand for something doesn't mean it should be fulfilled.: Murray N. Rothbard
In short, the Central Bank functions as a government cartelizing device to coordinate the banks so that they can evade the restrictions of free markets and free banking and inflate uniformly together. The banks do not chafe under central banking control; instead, they lobby for and welcome it. It is their passport to inflation and easy money.: Murray N. Rothbard,
The Mystery of Banking
The normative principle I am suggesting for the law is simply this: No action should be considered illicit or illegal unless it invades, or aggresses against, the person or just property of another. Only invasive actions should be declared illegal, and combated with the full power of the law.: Murray N. Rothbard
Suffice it to say that the basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a self-owner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another's person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or "mixes his labor with." From these twin axioms -- self-ownership and "homesteading" -- stem the justification for the entire system of property rig hts titles in a free-market society.: Murray N. Rothbard
Rather, no one has the right to legally prevent or retaliate against "harms" to his property unless it is an act of physical invasion. Everyone has the right to have the physical integrity of his property inviolate; no one has the right to protect the value of his property, for that value is purely the reflection of what people are willing to pay for it. That willingness solely depends on how they decide to use their money. No one can have a right to someone else's money, unless that other person had previously contracted to transfer it to him.: Murray N. Rothbard
... no one has a property right in his "reputation." Reputation is strictly a function of the subjective opinions of other minds, and they have the absolute right to their own opinions whatever they may be. Hence, outlawing defamation is itself a gross invasion of the defamer's right of freedom of speech, which is a subset of his property right in his own person.: Murray N. Rothbard
... there must be a concrete threat of an imminent battery before the prospective victim may legitimately use force and violence to defend himself.: Murray N. Rothbard
Negligence theory postulates a vague, "philosophical" notion of "cause in fact" that virtually blames everyone and no one, past, present and future for every act, and then narrows cause in a vague and unsatisfactory manner to "proximate cause" in the specific case.: Murray N. Rothbard
Although air pollution should be a tort subject to strict liability, it should be emphasized that statements like "everyone has the right to clean air" are senseless.: Murray N. Rothbard
But if there is no such entity as society or the state, or no one except the victim that should have any standing as a prosecutor or plaintiff, this means that the entire structure of criminal law must be dispensed with, and that we are left with tort law, where the victim indeed presses charges against the aggressor.: Murray N. Rothbard
Inflation, credit expansion, business cycles, heavy government debt, and high taxes are not, as Establishment historians claim, inevitable attributes of capitalism or of "modernization." On the contrary, these are profoundly anti-capitalist and parasitic excrescences grafted onto the system by the interventionist State, which rewards its banker and insider clients with hidden special privileges at the expense of everyone else.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Taking Money Back
It is true that the market can adjust to almost anything, but so what?: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
In a just society, then, only voluntary forgiveness by creditors would let debtors off the hook; otherwise, bankruptcy laws are an unjust invasion of the property rights of creditors.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
One myth about "debtors'" relief is that debtors are habitually poor and creditors rich, so that intervening to save debtors is merely a requirement of egalitarian "fairness." But this assumption was never true: in business, the wealthier the businessman the more likely he is to be a large debtor. It is the Donald Trumps and Robert Maxwells of this world whose debts spectacularly exceed their assets.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
Intervention on behalf of debtors has generally been lobbied for by large businesses with large debts.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
But when government borrows money, it does not pledge its own money; its own resources are not liable. Government commits not its own life, fortune, and sacred honor to repay the debt, but ours.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
For unlike the rest of us, government sells no productive good or service and therefore earns nothing. It can only get money by looting our resources through taxes, or through the hidden tax of legalized counterfeiting known as "inflation.": Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
The government gets the money by tax-coercion; and the public creditors, far from being innocents, know full well that their proceeds will come out of that selfsame coercion. In short, public creditors are willing to hand over money to the government now in order to receive a share of tax loot in the future.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
The public credit transaction is not a genuine contract that need be considered sacrosanct, any more than robbers parceling out their shares of loot in advance should be treated as some sort of sanctified contract.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
Contrary to Alexander Hamilton, who spoke for a small but powerful clique of New York and Philadelphia public creditors, the national debt is not a "national blessing.": Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
Establishment economists, including Reaganomists, cleverly fudge the issue by arbitrarily labeling virtually all government spending as "investments," making it sound as if everything is fine and dandy because savings are being productively "invested." In reality, however, government spending only qualifies as "investment" in an Orwellian sense; government actually spends on behalf of the "consumer goods" and desires of bureaucrats, politicians, and their dependent client groups.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
Thus, we see that statistics are not in the least "scientific" or "valuefree"; how data are classified -- whether, for example, government spending is "consumption" or "investment" -- depends upon the political philosophy and insights of the classifier.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
One of the cogent arguments against paying blacks "reparations" for past slavery is that we, the living, were not slaveholders. Similarly, we the living did not contract for either the past or the present debts incurred by the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
The United States government should be forced to disgorge its assets, sell them at auction, and then pay off the creditors accordingly. What government assets? There are a great deal of assets, from TVA to the national lands to various structures such as the Post Office. The massive CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, should raise a pretty penny for enough condominium housing for the entire work force inside the Beltway. Perhaps we could eject the United Nations from the United States, reclaim the land and buildings, and sell them for luxury housing for the East Side gliterati.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Repudiating the National Debt
Is there traffic congestion? Ban all cars! Water shortage? Drink less water! Postal deficit? Cut mail deliveries to one a day! Crime in urban areas? Impose curfews! No private supplier could long stay in business if he thus reacted to the wishes of customers? But when government is the supplier, instead of being guided by what the customer wants, it directs him to do with less or do without. While the motto of private enterprise is "the customer is always right," the slogan of government is "the public be damned!": Murray N. Rothbard,
Government in Business
Conflicts and bitterness are inherent in government operation. Imagine what would happen if all newspapers were published by government. First, because a government operation gets its revenues from coercive taxation in. stead Of voluntary payment for services rendered, it is not obliged to be efficient in serving the consumer. And, second, conflicts among groups of taxpayers would rage over editorial policy, news content, and even tabloid versus regular size. "Rightists," "leftists," "middle-of-the-roaders," each forced to pay for the paper, would naturally try to govern its policy.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Government in Business
On the free market ... each group finances and supports its own preferred product, whether newspaper, school, or package of baby food. Socialists, free enterprisers, progressives, traditionalists, gossip-lovers, and chess-lovers, all find schools, papers, or magazines that meet their needs. Preferences are given free rein, and no one is compelled to take an unwanted product. Every political preference, every variety of taste, is satisfied. Instead of a majority or the politically powerful tyrannizing over a minority, every individual may have as much as he can afford of precisely what he wants.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Government in Business
The standard government reply to charges of inefficiency or shortage is to blame the public: "Taxpayers won't give us more money!": Murray N. Rothbard,
Government in Business
In government, there are no profits for investors and no penalty charged against the inefficient operator. No one invests, therefore, and no one can insure that successful plants expand and unsuccessful ones disappear. These are some of the reasons why the government must raise its "capital" by literally conscripting it.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Government in Business
In short, a government business introduces a disruptive island of calculational chaos into the economic system.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Government in Business
Government ownership breeds insoluble conflicts, inevitable inefficiency, and breakdown of living standards. Private ownership brings peace, mutual harmony, great efficiency, and notable improvements in standards of living.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Government in Business
Money is the central commodity, the nerve center, as it were, of the modern market economy, and any system that vests the absolute control of that commodity in the hands of the State is hopelessly incompatible with a free-market economy or, ultimately, with individual liberty itself.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Milton Friedman Unraveled"
Of course, Friedman would then advise the Fed to use that absolute power wisely, but no libertarian worth the name can have anything but contempt for the very idea of vesting coercive power in any group and then hoping that such group will not use its power to the utmost.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Milton Friedman Unraveled"
Freedom must mean, among other things, the freedom to desecrate.: Murray N. Rothbard
Any libertarian strategy must recognize that intellectuals and opinion-moulders are part of the fundamental problem, not just because of error, but because their own self-interest is tied into the ruling system.: Murray N. Rothbard
Changing one's mind, if it is in the wrong direction, can obviously not be tolerated.: Murray N. Rothbard
New York is of course a famously left-wing city, and has therefore, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, been going down the tubes for decades.: Murray N. Rothbard
If any one man may be picked to sum up the victory of statist substance over the tinpot rhetoric, of the triumph of Big Government Conservatism, Richard Nixon is that man.: Murray N. Rothbard
Just call it "free trade," and free-market economists and libertarians will swallow anything.: Murray N. Rothbard,
STOP NAFTA!
Real free trade, of course, doesn't require years of high-level government negotiations. Real free trade doesn't require codicils and compromises and agreements. If the Bush administration had wanted real free trade, all they'd have had to do is to cut tariffs and quotas, abolish the International Trade Commission, the "anti-dumping" laws, and the rest of the panoply of monopolistic trade restrictions that injure American consumers and coddle inefficient producers.: Murray N. Rothbard,
STOP NAFTA!
What the Establishment wants is government-directed, government-negotiated trade, which is mercantilism not free trade.: Murray N. Rothbard,
STOP NAFTA!
One shouldn't think of the process of fighting the enemy as dour gloom and misery. On the contrary, it is highly inspiring and invigorating to take up arms against a sea of troubles instead of meeting them in supine surrender, and by opposing, perhaps to end them, and if not at least to give it a good try, to get in one's licks.: Murray N. Rothbard,
On Resisting Evil
And finally, what the heck, if you fight the enemy, you might win! Think of the brave fighters against Communism in Poland and the Soviet Union who never gave up, who fought on against seemingly impossible odds, and then, bingo, one day Communism collapsed. Certainly the chances of winning are a lot greater if you put up a fight than if you simply give up.: Murray N. Rothbard,
On Resisting Evil
The parasitical organism doesn't want the host to think of itself as a distinct entity, with interests of its own. So it tries rhetorically to 'unify' the two organisms in the undifferentiated pronoun 'we'." Exactly!: Murray N. Rothbard
I am strongly opposed to economists simply leaping from their economic analysis to a political stance, without bringing in a coherent ethical system, a coherent political philosophy. I do not oppose ethics and political philosophy, far from it; it is just that economics by itself is not sufficient for a political conclusion, although it helps immensely by providing data for a political philosophy.: Murray N. Rothbard,
correspondence with publishers of Man, Economy, and State
'Economic' is by no means equivalent to 'material.': Murray N. Rothbard,
Man, Economy, and State
Morality and economic utility generally go hand in hand.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Repudiating the National Debt"
Government spending, therefore, rather than being "investment," is consumer spending of a peculiarly wasteful and unproductive sort, since it is indulged not by producers but by a parasitic class that is living off, and increasingly weakening, the productive private sector.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Repudiating the National Debt"
Thus, we see that statistics are not in the least "scientific" or "valuefree"; how data are classified -- whether, for example, government spending is "consumption" or "investment" -- depends upon the political philosophy and insights of the classifier.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Repudiating the National Debt"
It is ridiculous for a citizen to be taxed by one arm of the federal government (the IRS), to pay interest and principal on debt owned by another agency of the federal government.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Repudiating the National Debt"
To say that only individuals act is not to deny that they are influenced in their desires and actions by the acts of other individuals, who might be fellow members of various societies or groups. We do not at all assume, as some critics of economics have charged, that individuals are 'atoms' isolated from one another.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Man, Economy, & State
The means to satisfy man's wants are called goods. These goods are all the objects of economizing action. Such goods may all be classified in either of two categories: (a) they are immediately and directly serviceable in the satisfaction of the actor's wants, or (b) they may be transformable into directly serviceable goods only at some point in the future -- i.e., are indirectly serviceable means. The former are called consumption goods or consumers' goods or goods of the first order. The latter are called producers' goods or factors of production or goods of higher order.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Man, Economy, & State
If there's anything in the world that's a zero-sum game, it's taxation.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"A Future of Peace and Capitalism"
I really think that free-market capitalism, even though it is supposed to be a reactionary, Neanderthal institution, is the wave of the future. For one thing, it was the wave of the future a hundred and two hundred years ago, and what we have now is only a reactionary reversion to the previous system. The present system is not really "progressive" at all.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"A Future of Peace and Capitalism"
Thus, we have a lot of crises looming in America, some on their way, others imminent or already here. All of these crises are the products of intervention, and none of them can really be solved by more intervention.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"A Future of Peace and Capitalism"
Scholarship is essentially confirming your early paranoia through a deeper factual analysis.: Murray N. Rothbard
... if you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place.: Murray N. Rothbard,
If the masses knew what was going on, they would withdraw their consent quickly: they would soon perceive that the emperor has no clothes, that they are being ripped off. That is where the intellectuals come in.: Murray N. Rothbard,
The Irrepressible Rothbard, chapter 1: "A STRATEGY FOR THE RIGHT"
My personal odyssey is unimportant; the important point is that if I can move from "extreme right" to "extreme left" merely by standing in one place, drastic though unrecognized changes must have taken place throughout the American political spectrum over the last generation.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal"
Freedom and peace are inherently intertwined, and the way to preserve peace is to avoid war, not to go out of your way to seek one.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Buckley Revealed"
the economy of fascism: an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Nixonian Socialism"
This concept needs to be savored: government, the quintessence of coercion, is going to plan a nationwide "voluntary" effort. George Orwell, where art thou now? War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Voluntary Action is Government Planning.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Libertarian Cover for the Corporate State"
Free trade not only means unrestricted trade; it also means unsubsidized trade.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Where the Left Goes Wrong on Foreign Policy"
Every time some kid is busted for pot smoking you can pin much of the responsibility on the Conservative Movement and its fusionist-Buckleyite misleaders.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Listen, YAF" Libertarian Forum, August 15, 1969 (PDF)
Adam Smith (1723-90) is a mystery in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma. The mystery is the enormous and unprecedented gap between Smith's exalted reputation and the reality of his dubious contribution to economic thought.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Chapter 16 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought
Valuable truths can be learned about the content of economics, not only from the latest journals, but from the texts of long-deceased economic thinkers.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Why I Wrote My Histories of Thought"
The only freedom of speech worth talking about is one that permits the speech of groups and ideologies that we hate.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"Myths of the Cold War"
Science, after all, means scientia, correct knowledge; it is older and wiser than the positivist-pragmatist attempt to monopolize the term.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"The Mantle of Science"
Scientism is the profoundly unscientific attempt to transfer uncritically the methodology of the physical sciences to the study of human action.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"The Mantle of Science"
On Determinism: "Surely the burden of proof must rest on the one advancing a theory, particularly when the theory contradicts man's primary impressions.": Murray N. Rothbard,
"The Mantle of Science"
[T]he term "equilibrium" has emotional connotations, and so it was only a brief step to the further mischief of holding up equilibrium as not only possible, but as the ideal by which to gauge all existing institutions. But since man, by his very nature, must keep acting, he cannot be in equilibrium while he lives, and therefore the ideal, being impossible, is also inappropriate.: Murray N. Rothbard,
"The Mantle of Science"
Smokers, if you have the guts to form a Smokers Defense League, I will be happy to join a Non-Smokers Auxiliary!: Murray N. Rothbard,
"America's Most Persecuted Minority"
"Much of the current wave of Political Correctness is a crazed attempt to continue and to justify swinish behavior, while trying to substitute a host of formal rules for decent politeness. But these formal rules are the reverse of manners, for they are used as clubs to impose one's will on others, all in the name of 'sensitivity.'": Murray N. Rothbard,
"'Tolerance' or Manners?"
Where in the world is the justice here? The victim not only loses his money, but pays more money besides for the dubious thrill of catching, convicting, and then supporting the criminal; and the criminal is still enslaved, but not to the good purpose of recompensing his victim.: Murray N. Rothbard,
The Ethics of Liberty,
"Punishment and Proportionality"

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.: Mark Twain
Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.: Wallace Sayre
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.: Henry Kissinger
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.: William James
How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?: Elliot, "E.T."
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.: Wittgenstein
Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.: Will Rogers
No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending.: Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"
The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is a constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read.: Alberto Moravia
The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.: Christopher Morley
Try not to have a good time ... This is supposed to be educational.: Charles Schulz
Whenever anyone says, "theoretically," they really mean, "not really.": Dave Parnas
You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.: H.H. Munro
Your education begins where what is called your education is over.: --Anonymous
"If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything.": --Anonymous
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.: --Anonymous
If you are too busy to read, then you are too busy.: --Anonymous
Common sense is a conditioned reflex which we mistake for insight about the universe.: Hugh Kenner
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.: George Bernard Shaw
Those who feel certainty are stupid and those with any imagination or understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.: Bertrand Russell
The annals of the French Revolution prove that the knowledge of the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the many . . . the light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the victims rather than the illuminators of the multitude.: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Own Times, 1850
Education is the tendency toward moral despotism raised to a principle.: Leo Tolstoy
I am convinced that the educator undertakes with such zeal the education of the child, because at the base of this tendency lies his envy of the child's purity, and his desire to make him like himself, that is, to spoil him.: Leo Tolstoy
With police action and imprisonment as an ever-present threat for those who dare to disobey, the state tries in myriad ways to control the daily lives of its subjects. It attempts to force all young people into its indoctrination factories, where they are crowded together in same age herds, sometimes forced to all dress alike, expected to respect the authority of self-appointed experts, intimidated or brutalized by violent peers, and frequently not even taught to read or write. People who attempt to rescue their children from this system are treated with suspicion and forced to surrender the privacy of their homes to the inspection of bureaucrats who believe they know better how to take care of their children.: Joe Peacott, anarchy in kansas
"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.": e. e. cummings "A Poet's Advice to Students"
We live in a society that sometimes pays lip service to thinking for yourself but doesn't particularly encourage it.: Sharon Presley, Ph.D., Independent Thinking Review
Boy, You intellectuals sure have a lot time on your hands.: Email from Rick Lozano, someone I don't know.
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself.: Ralph Waldo Emerson
It would be a mistake to assume that the present-day educational system is unchanging. On the contrary, it is undergoing rapid change. But much of this change is no more than an attempt to refine the existent machinery, making it ever more efficient in pursuit of obsolete goals.: Alvin Toffler
Many are drawn to science fiction and fantasy literature because it provides alternate universes where they can speculate about what it would be like to live in a society that respected intelligence over beauty and imagination over conformity.: Katherine Gates in an article about transformation fetishists, The Position
Do you know when you're not being taken?: Babba Ram Das
People have to go out of their minds before they can come to their senses.: Timothy Leary
one cannot judge "art" for the masses unless he is truly average in intellect, thought and creativity, which is usually the case among critics.: billy mac
My grandmother wanted me to have an education so she kept me out of school.: Margaret Mead
When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food.: Erasmus
A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world of being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. 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.: Dresden James
Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.: Sir Winston Churchill
What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know; it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.: Yogi Berra
One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.: Alphonse Bertillon
There's a difference between being educated and being schooled.: bk's review of Deschooling Our Lives
The problem is not that public schools do not work well, but rather that they do. The first goal and primary function of schools is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we normally label state indoctrination.: Wendy McElroy, Demystifying the State
With the old not much can be done; but with their children, the great remedy is education. The rising generation must be taught as our children are taught. We say must be, because in many cases this can only be accomplished by coercion. . . . Children must be gathered up and forced into schools and those who resist and impede this plan, whether parents or priests, must be held accountable and punished.: Horace Mann,
19th-century creator of "public education",
speaking on the subject of Irish Catholics
An academic has and wants an audience disproportionately made up of teachers and students, while an intellectual has and wants teachers and students in his audience only in proportion to their place in the general educated public. An academic is a specialist who has disciplined his curiosity to operate largely within a designated area, while an intellectual is a generalist who deliberately does otherwise. An academic is concerned with substance and suspicious of style, while an intellectual is suspicious of any substance that purports to transcend or defy style.: Jack Miles,
Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual:
What Happens to the Liberal Arts When They are Kicked Off Campus?
... for no one can provide pleasure who never seeks pleasure, and no one who never reads for beauty will ever write beautifully.: Jack Miles,
Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual:
What Happens to the Liberal Arts When They are Kicked Off Campus?
The voguish phrase public intellectual is at least temporarily useful, but most public intellectuals would be more accurately called public academics; for even as they turn their attention to matters of public interest, they retain their academic appointments and, for much of their professional life, their academic constituency as well. If all intellectuals are understood to have the public as their sole defining constituency, then the adjective public in public intellectual becomes redundant, and the public academic is correctly seen as a mixed or transitional type, an academic moonlighting or auditioning as an intellectual.: Jack Miles,
Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual:
What Happens to the Liberal Arts When They are Kicked Off Campus?
Most parents cannot conceive of a totally privatized alternative because they themselves have been indoctrinated by public schooling to believe in its alleged necessity.: The Central Fallacy of Public Schooling, by Daniel Hager
...despite the prejudices instilled in us by the democratic process and public education, an opinion rooted in ignorance is not the equal of an opinion rooted in even a moderate amount of experience.: L. Neil Smith
Habits of mind are hard to break. Sometimes radical intellectual surgery is the only way.: Lew Rockwell
When young men go to their schools and start killing teachers and classmates, the statists refuse to ask the most obvious question: why did they select a government school as their target? Why have privately owned schools been largely immune from such acts of rage?: Butler Shaffer
At FEE [the Foundation for Economic Education] it's our policy not to tell the government how to run its schools. We just think no one should be forced to attend or pay for them.: Sheldon Richman, Editor, Ideas on Liberty: "PERSPECTIVE: Weighing In"
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.: Ezra Loomis Pound
The Economist (1/24/04) proclaims: "When universities depend on taxpayers, their independence and standards suffer." The article describes British universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, as lowering their standards for want of finance. No, public education is not going to improve. (NOTE: I use "public" in American fashion. The British would say "state."): Jack Powelson, The Quaker Economist, Letter no. 95
Plus, it is not as if the intellectual knows nothing of the world of business: he has, after all, read Dickens and seen Death of a Salesman. What more could one ask?: Edward Feser, "Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?"
Finally, even the worst teacher has what the entertainers, athletes, and salesmen he often resents all crave: a captive audience, full of young, ignorant, and naive people who assume him to be infallible. This can naturally go to one's head, and lead to delusions of competence.: Edward Feser, "Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?"
The professor makes his living lecturing to people, and most of them think he's pretty smart. Who could be better qualified, then, to lecture to society as a whole?: Edward Feser, "Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?"
Repeatedly falsified apocalyptic predictions have made many a fundamentalist preacher into a laughingstock; they made Stanford University eco-alarmist Paul Ehrlich into a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant winner.: Edward Feser, "Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?"
The eggheads who gave us the Great Society inadvertently created an entire underclass: millions of children have grown up without fathers in the decades since, but the eggheads kept their tenure.: Edward Feser, "Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?"
A class is nothing more than an arbitrary grouping of entities that share common characteristics as determined from a certain epistemological point of view. In short, what constitutes a class is defined by the purposes of the definer.: Wendy McElroy
There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
I don't assume the universe obeys my preconceptions -- ha! -- but I know a frelling fact when it hits me in the face!: Dominar Rigel XVI, Farscape
Who will teach our children the skills that are necessary to become economically productive? Bureaucrats reproduce themselves in the classroom: obedience counts far more than creativity. Teachers are paid to maintain order. If there is actual teaching going on, no one cares too much, one way or the other, unless the teaching is superb. Then envy takes over on the faculty. Pressures are applied. The creative teachers eventually leave.: Gary North, The Abolition of Grandparents
Grandparents for thousands of years watered the flowers. Their unofficial job was to discover what a child did well and encourage the child to do it even better. It was the parents? task to maintain order. Uprooting weeds was the parents? task. The grandparent could concentrate on more productive matters.: Gary North, The Abolition of Grandparents
"Grandma, look what I made!" was followed by, "That's wonderful!" Then, "Would you like me to show you how I made those when I was a little girl?" In every society I have ever read about, there is some version of this crucial verbal exchange. We can mark the decline of a society by the departure of this verbal exchange.: Gary North, The Abolition of Grandparents
Those of us who believe forcing the unwilling to fund the education of other people's children is immoral, or who think bureaucratized education is systemically flawed and reduces the quality of education, are unlikely to work in government schools. Thus, government schools are structurally biased against free-market thinking. Advocates of economic liberty aren't likely to seek employment in a socialized industry.: Ari Armstrong, Teaching Kids to Love Big Government
Prior to World War I, taxes in all nations were under 10% of income. After World War I, no nation enjoyed this degree of liberty. We get used to the demons we know, including the tax collectors. History textbooks do not remind us of the low-tax world we have lost, because textbooks are written for use in tax-supported public schools, which do not call into question the prevailing tax level, except to suggest higher taxes on the rich.: Gary North
The government has had an iron grip on the American educational system for generations, and it's not about to ease up on that grip by teaching American school children about the virtues of limited government.: Thomas J. DiLorenzo, "Constitutional Futility"
The public school is rooted in coercion. No one really wants to be there, so the pressures run in the direction of control, mediocrity, non-accountability, waste, and stupidity. In private school, the pressures tend toward excellence, accountability, and learning. It is not a universal rule, of course, but it is a dominant tendency. What marks the difference is the institution of private property, the structural prerequisite to productive competition.: Lew Rockwell, "Two Kinds of Competition"
A scientist tries to find knowledge nobody ever knew before, and communicate it in terms everybody understands. A poet tries to do just the opposite.: -- ?
... the competitive pressures of the real business world make businessmen smarter than academicians after a while. Businessmen have to please and impress customers for a living. Customers are harsh, unbiased, largely accurate critics. Academicians generally have to please only each other.: Brad Edmonds, "Understanding Businesspeak"
If this is a "little quizzy," I'd sure hate to see your big testies!: Hilary Fleming, Bryn Mawr College, ~ 1960
In my view, if a kid bullies, he ought to--quite literally--be arrested and imprisoned for a time, and punished with severe pain. And if he does it again, he should be imprisoned for a long time, if not ejected from society. I am quite serious. They are criminals, pure and simple. There is no excuse for it.: Stephan Kinsella, "Toward a Theory of Bullying"
Never tell the complete truth to a kid. He might draw accurate conclusions.: Gary North, "Whining Parents"
Most Western intellectuals respect visible power above everything else.: Gary North, "The Asymmetrical Rhetoric of War and Peace"
I know no time which is lost more thoroughly than that devoted to arguing on matters of fact with a disputant who has no facts, but only very strong convictions.: James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, London 1901
You'll know that you have been a success when somebody quotes one of your ideas to you without knowing where it came from.: Anonymous
First, to the extent that government successfully provides little Jimmy with academic skills, he grows up thinking that only the government can teach such skills. Second, insofar as the government fails to endow little Jimmy with scholastic and intellectual prowess, he grows up that much more docile, uncritical, malleable. Either way, the government comes out ahead.: Anthony Gregory, "Government Schools: There's No Success Like Failure"
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.: Niels Bohr, 1885-1962

The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge. In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: "Yes, madam, everything's going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you'll carry coal.": Henry Hazlitt, "On Appeasing Envy"
Socialists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized destitution were preferable to "maldistributed" plenty.: Henry Hazlitt, "On Appeasing Envy"
A national income that is rapidly growing in absolute terms for practically everyone will be deplored because it is making the rich richer.: Henry Hazlitt, "On Appeasing Envy"

"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.": Jack Nicholson
Again and again, the homosexual threat turns out to be imaginary; straights have far less to fear from gay inclusion than gays do from exclusion.: Jonathan Rauch, "Objections to These Unions:
What Friedrich Hayek can teach us about gay marriage."
In a shifting current, holding your course can be just as dangerous as oversteering. Conservatives, in their panic to stop same-sex marriage, jeopardize marriage?s universality and ultimately its legitimacy.: Jonathan Rauch, "Objections to These Unions:
What Friedrich Hayek can teach us about gay marriage."

The real reason large families benefit society is because at least a few of the children in the world shouldn't be raised by beginners.: Anonymous
"There is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.": Mark Twain
What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?: Bertold Brecht
"All the system's paths must be topologically and circularly interrelated for conceptually definitive, locally transformable, polyhedronal understanding to be attained in our spontaneous -- ergo, most economical -- geodesiccally structured thoughts.": R. Buckminster Fuller
Wish and hope succeed in discerning signs of paranormality where reason and careful scientific procedure fail.: James E. Alcock, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12
The prettiest women are almost always the most boring, and that is why some people feel there is no God.: Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.: Woody Allen
I am far from being a pessimist ... On the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life!: Eugene O'Neill, American Playwright, 1888 - 1953
Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.: Frank Lloyd Wright, architect (1867-1959)
Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious, lifetime occupation.: Robert M. Pirsig, Afterward to Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
"Sickness," like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes it takes the form of personal convictions...: Robert Bloch
Why do you think I wear a target on my chest?: Batman, Dark Knight Returns
Foreign women are not aware of Islamic rules and when you don't shake their hands they become red and yellow.: Hadi Nejad Hosseinian, Iran's former representative to the United Nations
Everybody gets the Timothy Leary that they deserve.: Timothy Leary
The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours, since it all comes down to territorial brawling in the end.: Timothy Leary
When you work as cheap as I do, the studio hands you the money and tells you to go off with your friends and have fun, which is basically what we do.: Christopher Guest
It is not necessary to inquire whether a woman would like something for dessert. The answer is yes, she would like something for dessert, but she would like you to order it so she can pick at it with your fork. She does not want you to call attention to this by saying, 'If you wanted a dessert, why didn't you order one?' You must understand, she has the dessert she wants. The dessert she wants is contained within yours.: Merrill Marcoe, "An Insider's Guide to the American Woman"
"Men don't listen to what women say," women complain. This is why there are so many female realtors. They do listen to what women say. They can actually understand what women mean, despite what women actually say.: Gary North
The ad hominem attack saves time, but it's still a fallacy.: Larry Niven
"I hate quotations.": Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.: H.G. Wells
Years ago it meant something to be crazy, now everybody's crazy.: Charles Manson
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.: John F. Kennedy
We apologize for the error in last week's paper in which we stated that Mr. Arnold Dogbody was a defective in the police force. We meant, of course, that Mr. Dogbody is a detective in the police farce.: Correction Notice in the Ely Standard, a British newspaper
Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.: Frank Zappa
Without deviation progress is not possible.: Frank Zappa
You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.: Frank Zappa
The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.: Frank Zappa
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of humankind as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing at all.: Helen Keller
Repeat after me: I am not a pleasure unit.: James Coburn as Derek Flint in Our Man Flint
I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.: Lloyd Dobler, Say Anything
How many of them really know what they want though? I mean, a lot of them think they have to know, right, but inside they don't really know so... I don't know, but I know that I don't know.: Lloyd Dobler, Say Anything
You know the great thing about TV? If something important happens anywhere at all in the world, no matter what time of the day or night, you can always change the channel.: Jim Ignatowski, Taxi
And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit!: The Tick
Perhaps parents and teachers who relish unquestioned obedience are right to be concerned about Harry Potter, but their focus is misplaced. It is not the magic, but the morality of Harry Potter that is truly subversive.: Julian Sanchez, Reason Magazine's Assistant Editor
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on.: George W. Bush, joking to a crowd of Washington insiders, shortly after his inauguration
He who dares not to offend cannot be honest.: Thomas Paine
The art-screw can exist as a denial of the complication of its function in a way that we cannot conceive of an art-nail.: Rory Byrne
The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it.: Huck Finn
Your heart is telling you? Who's the boss, you or your heart? You are! Your heart is your employee. So get your heart off its butt and back to work!: Hank Hill, King of the Hill
I'm tired of being lack-of-focused!: Bobby Hill, King of the Hill
What the hell kind of country is this where I can only hate a man if he's white?: Hank Hill, King of the Hill
Why? Why would they shoot people? Human meat's tough, flavorless. They should be out hunting more dog!: Bill Dauterive, King of the Hill
The words I don't know could fill a dictionary!: Luanne, King of the Hill
First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.": Peter Ellis, on alt.fan.pratchett
Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?: Jean-Baptiste Say, An Economist in Troubled Times
An individual's "moral" values are construed as those of his preferences that he wants everyone to adopt (and wants everyone to want everyone to adopt); and a group's morality is the set of moral values shared by most of its members.: Michael Levin
The truly selfish person (I know, I know, Ayn Rand insisted on her peculiar use of the word "selfish", but I think she was wrong) is the one who wants the government to forcibly take other people's money and use it on ends that the person advocating force agrees with.: David Henderson, The Reluctant Activist
I'm an adult: I'm not going to break the rules.: Patty Chase, My So-Called Life
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.: Oscar Wilde
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.: Terry Pratchett
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.: Galileo Galilei
Don't take life so serious, son, it ain't nohow permanent.: Walt Kelly
Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are master of your fate and captain of your soul.: Jawaharlal Nehru
Keep Cool, but Don't Freeze: Hellman's Mayonnaise
Paradise is exactly like where you are right now ... only much, much better.: Laurie Anderson
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.: Philip K. Dick
Whenever anyone says, "theoretically", they really mean, "not really.": Dave Parnas
If you think that by threatening me you can get me to do what you want... Well, that's where you're right. But, and I am only saying this because I care, there's a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing.: Chris Knight, Real Genius
I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it.: Jack Handy
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.: Mark Twain
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.: Mark Twain
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.: Voltaire
To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.: Anatole France
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.: Redd Foxx
Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.: Ashleigh Brilliant
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.: Ashleigh Brilliant
The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.: Salvador Dali
Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.: Thomas Edison
The notion that deviance and corruption lie underneath the seeming conformism of suburban middle-class life, popular in Hollywood and in creative-writing workshops, is largely nonsense.: David Brooks "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," The Atlantic Monthly, December 2001
People in Franklin County are contemptuous of Bill Clinton and his serial infidelities, but they are not necessarily fans of Kenneth Starr -- at least not the Kenneth Starr the media portrayed. They don't like public scolds.: David Brooks "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," The Atlantic Monthly, December 2001
... according to a 1994 study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, conservative Protestant women have more orgasms than any other group.: David Brooks "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," The Atlantic Monthly, December 2001
I think it needs to be said since we seem to be so proud of Columbus, that when he left for this country he did not know where he was going, and when he got here, he did not know where he was, and when he got back, he did not know where he had been.: Rep. Joe Waggoner (D-LA), 1968
Remember, it was amateurs who built the Ark, and professionals who built the Titanic.: Steven LaTulippe, "The Curious Bush Recovery"
I am not some professional politician in a silk suit who has never worked with his hands. I work with my hands! I am typing with my hands right now!: Dave Barry
Carpe Noctem: Angel, 3rd Season
I would like to apologize to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for referring to its members as ... colored people.: Steve Martin, Pure Drivel
Neptune has seen many species come and go. Microbes have been spontaneously generated nine times over the eons. It has been visited by aliens 37 different times. It has seen 43 wars, five of them atomic, and the creation of 1,026 religions, none of which possessed any universal truths.: Mike Resnick, "The Elephants of Neptune"
Wars do not bring out the Emily Post in us.: Fred On Everything
The transporter always made Captain Kirk and Spock disappear in a cloud of little flashy light thingies. The trouble was, they reappeared somewhere else. I figured it was a design flaw with transporters.: Fred On Everything
Without men, civilization would last until the oil needed changing.: Fred On Everything
Man, I can't wait 'til I'm old enough to feel ways about stuff!: Philip J. Fry, Futurama, Season 3, Episode 4: "The Luck of the Fryish"
Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others!: Groucho Marx
They expect us to change, but we cannot change, for to change would mean ... an effort!: Dave Foley, Kids in the Hall
One cannot multiply quantities by qualities and get a mathematically respectable answer.: Sir Isaac Newton
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.: Gravity's Rainbow
Celebrate nature's beauty, diversity, and bounty by eating all of it.: "Eat Baby Seals"
"...deconstruction means you never have to say you're sorry.": Mark Lilla, in a 1998 article in The New York Review of Books
You know, we've had a lot of laughs tonight, but I'll tell you what's not funny: killing strippers. Strippers are people too. Naked people who may be willing to pleasure you for a price you negotiate later behind a curtain in the VIP room. Besides, there's no need to kill 'em, because most of them are already dead inside. Good night, everyone.: Peter Griffin, The Family Guy
Why are vitamins given boring letters, like C, K, B-12, whereas elements get cool names, like Helium, Einsteinium, etc.? If I were a vitamin I'd be upset at the disparate treatment, though I would console myself that I am made up of elements.: Stephan Kinsella
You don't have to watch re-runs of "Baywatch" to understand why television is universally referred to as "the boob tube.": Thomas DiLorenzo, "It Depends on What the Meaning of 'Us' Is"
Q: What's Better Than a Medal in the Special Olympics? A: Not being special.: Vache Folle
I used to read the sports page before my haircuts so that I could say something, anything, if only to prevent the men from muttering about the odd bird in the bow tie after I left.: Jeffrey Tucker, "What Men Want"
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.: George Orwell

... because I'm just a big dummy who connotes everything.: Mrs. Marcus
Toes are for keeping the blud in your boty.: Nathalie Charron, grade 1
Bird's-Eye View
I'd feel scared too deth. I cud see houses, trees, bushes, bildings, birds, dogs, cats, foxes, deers and grass. It's about me on a eagle. Seeing thingse on erth.: Nathalie Charron, grade 1
Sometimes I imagine that the wood is singing of the forest it used to know.: Carolyn Fay, talking about her guitar.
Chilly and silly and running willy-nilly humming hillbilly tunes in a town near Philly.: Carolyn Fay
True enough, empires fall, and they fall because forcing people to do anything -- even be peaceful -- takes an effort that is unsustainable for the oppressor and unendurable for the oppressed.: David E. Miller
black hole rhymes with soul...: Ron Koch
I mean what kind of world is it when heartless, selfish, evil men can't even be happy?: Clinton Johnston, "Drood Blues"

A zygote is a gamete's way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet you can't win.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Always store beer in a dark place.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
By the data to date, there is only one animal in the galaxy dangerous to man -- man himself. So he must supply his own indespensable competition. He has no enemy to help him.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Men are more sentimental than women. It blurs their thinking.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science, it is opinion.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
It has long been known that one horse can run faster than another -- but which one? Differences are crucial.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Most 'scientists' are bottle washers and button sorters.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer you a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate -- and quickly.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
A motion to adjourn is always in order.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops, and in the long run no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: 'Come back with your shield, or on it.' Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Of all the strange 'crimes' that human beings have legislated out of nothing, 'blasphemy' is the most amazing -- with 'obscenity' and 'indecent exposure' fighting it out for second and third place.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon you will know -- So why fret about it?: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Cheop's Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
It is better to copulate than never.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
All men are created unequal.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Money is a powerful aphrodisiac. But flowers work almost as well.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness etcetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
There is only one way to console a widow. But remember the risk.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Avoid making irrevocable decisions while tired or hungry. N.B.: Circumstances can force your hand. So think ahead!: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Place your clothes and your weapons where you can find them in the dark.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
An elephant: A mouse built to government specifications.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
In a mature society, 'civil servant' is semantically equal to 'civil master.': Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
When the need arises -- and it does -- you must be able to shoot your own dog. Don't farm it out. That doesn't make it nicer, it makes it worse.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Masturbation is cheap, clean, convenient, and free of any possibility of wrongdoing -- and you don't have to go home in the cold. But it's lonely.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Never appeal to a man's 'better nature.' He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
The second most preposterous notion is that copulation is inherently sinful.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of -- but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
$100 placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000 -- by which time it will be worth nothing.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Darling, a true lady takes off her dignity with her clothes and does her whorish best. At other times you can be as modest and dignified as your persona requires.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
You can have peace, or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
The shamans are forever yacking about their snake-oil 'miracles.' I prefer the Real McCoy -- a pregnant woman.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
If the universe has any purpose more important than topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I've never heard of it.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Thou shalt remember the Eleventh Commandment and keep it Wholly.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an 'intellectual' -- find out how he feels about astrology.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
When the ship lifts, all bills are paid. No regrets.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
War is too serious a matter to be taught by the inexperienced.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Money is the sincerest of all flattery. Women love to be flattered. So do men.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
You live and learn. Or you don't live long.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Peace is an extension of war by political means. plenty of elbowroom is pleasanter -- and much safer.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering. 'Supernatural' is a null word.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Rub her feet.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dreamworld.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Always tell her she is beautiful, especially if she is not.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget, awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool.): Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Another ingredient for a happy marriage: Budget the luxuries first!: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Another ingredient for a happy marriage: See to it that she has her own desk -- then keep your hands off it!: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Another ingredient for a happy marriage: In a family argument, if it turns out that you are right -- apologize at once!: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
'God split himself into a myriad parts that He might have friends.' This may not be true, but it sounds good and is no sillier than any other theology.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Does history record any case in which the majority was right?: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
When the fox gnaws -- smile!: Robert A. Heinlein,
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.: Robert Heinlein

It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln ... He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes.: H.L. Mencken in his private diary on April 13, 1945, the day after FDR's death
One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.: H.L. Mencken
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.: H.L. Mencken
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.: H.L. Mencken

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.: Martin Luther King, Jr.

If God lived on Earth, people would knock out all His windows.: Yiddish saying
Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us... From this point of view, theism is an addiction. We're all addicted to hope... Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves... In a non-theistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.: Pema Chodron, Buddhist nun
If triangles had a God, he would have 3 sides.: Montesquieu
My God -- this place is beautiful. You people live in Paradise.: Mikhail Gorbachev, upon arriving at the University of Virginia
The average European's faith in the state is remarkable, impressive by the standards of any religion. You can show them economic reasons why various interventionist policies are sure to fail, or why the market would be superior to state planning in a given case, and like the most devout fundamentalist attending a class on evolutionary biology, they will refuse to hear any of it. They believe in government because they believe in it, end of story.: J. H. Huebert
Outgrowing superstitious ignorance in the form of the Catholic faith may be a good thing--but not when you replace it with a belief in the almighty State. God may not punish the Europeans for their changed allegiance, but the hard facts of economic reality are already doing so, and will continue to do so.: J. H. Huebert
A cult is a religion with no political power: Tom Wolfe
The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own.: Frank Zappa
Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: 'Great God, grant that twice two be not four.': Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) Russian novelist, writer
If you talk to God, you're praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.: Thomas Szasz
I call him free who is led solely by reason.: Spinoza
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.: Stephen F. Roberts
I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.: John Stuart Mill
A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.": Stephen Crane, War is Kind
I'm a paranoid agnostic. I doubt the existence of God, but I'm sure there is some force, somewhere, working against me.: Marc Maron
A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
If you don't believe in Gosh too, you'll be darned to heck.
If god doesn't like the way I live, Let him tell me, not you.
The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.: Deuteronomy 24:16
Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you--even, perhaps against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.: Neil Gaiman

In vain you tell me that artificial government is good, but that I fall out only with the abuse. The thing! The thing itself is the abuse!: Edmund Burke, Vindication of the Natural Society, 1756
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.: Harry Truman
Drug control is a thin pretext, and getting thinner, to increase police powers and to brand dissent as criminal.: William S. Burroughs
"The first problem for the government in carrying out an industrial policy is that we actually know precious little about identifying, before the fact, a 'winning' industrial structure.": Charles L. Schultze, President Jimmy Carter's chief economic adviser
Political people don't solve stuff -- not really. Political people are like guys in pop music. Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.: Bruce Sterling
What would you think of someone who said, "I would like to have a cat provided it barked"? Yet your statement that you favor a government provided it behaves as you believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The biological laws that specify the characteristics of cats are no more rigid than the political laws that specify the behavior of government agencies once they are established. The way the government behaves and the adverse consequences are not an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a consequence of its constitution in precisely the same way that a meow is related to the constitution of a cat.: From "Free To Choose" by Milton Friedman
Cable is not a luxury, since many areas have poor TV reception.: The mayor of Tucson, Arizona, 1989
Having "a little government" is precisely identical to being "a little pregnant." At first, it doesn't show. After a while, it gets a little bigger. Ultimately, it causes a lot of unavoidable pain—and never really goes away for the rest of your life. Government in this country has become like the parasitic 35-year-old son living in his parents' basement. They can ignore him, they can pretend he doesn't exist, but ultimately it's clear that the only thing he's doing is sucking away their money and providing precious little in return.: William Stone, III
Government is becoming an uglier caricature of its former unattractive self.: Catfarmer
Democracy--Everyone eventually gets a chance to make someone else miserable.: Catfarmer
We hold each other hostage as we attempt to extort some meaning out of life.: Catfarmer
[The] leash may be invisible, but it will only grow shorter.: Catfarmer
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises a formidable outcry in defence of custom.": Thomas Paine, 'Common Sense'
The people who signed the pretended "U.S. Constitution," called themselves "We The People... " They were lying. They signed it as individuals. And they never signed it in any way to make it a binding contract.: THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT by Frederick Mann
[T]hose who attack the rationale of the game... are its most formidable adversaries.: James J. Martin,
Introduction to Lysadner Spooner's No Treason
Libertarians make no exceptions to the golden rule and provide no moral loophole, no double standard, for government. That is, libertarians believe that murder is murder and does not become sanctified by reasons of State if committed by the government. We believe that theft is theft and does not become legitimated because organized robbers call their theft "taxation." We believe that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing that act calls it "conscription." In short, the key to libertarian theory is that it makes no exceptions in its universal ethic for government.: Murray N. Rothbard,
Six Myths About Libertarianism
[T]he political confidence trick, whether monarchic or presidential, oligarchic or democratic, whether necessary or unnecessary, is at any rate effective, because most people are foolish and gullible.: Ferdinand Mount, The Theater of Politics
The theory is comforting: they are our hired servants. The practice is humiliating; we are their wayward wards, to be comforted, cajoled, bullied, but never to be treated as equals, never to be told more of the truth than suits their present purposes, and too often to be told off-white lies.: Ferdinand Mount, The Theater of Politics
Because most people obey the words of politicians and bureaucrats, they don't have to use their guns all that often.: THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT by Frederick Mann
Most people believe that some of the noises and scribbles emanating from the mouths and pens of the lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats (masquerading as "government" so-called) are somehow special and constitute "the law." This is a grotesque superstition.: THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT by Frederick Mann
The first superstition that keeps "government" in place is the belief that because practically all of us use certain words without any thought as to their validity and the consequences they produce ... therefore these words are valid and represent reality.: THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT by Frederick Mann
You have a choice between the natural stability of gold and the honesty and intelligence of the members of government. And with all due respect for those gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, vote for gold.: George Bernard Shaw
A policeman is someone who writes your name down after you've been robbed.: Russell Baker
The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.: Ursula K. Le Guin
The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced.: Frank Zappa
Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.: Denis Diderot
When you advocate any government action, you must first believe that violence is the best answer to the question at hand.: Allen Thornton, Laws of the Jungle
The weakness of fascism and communism consists in their turning citizens into slaves. Slaves have nothing to gain and nothing to lose. The strength of democracy is that it encourages the common man to believe himself a ruler, that is, an oppressor of his neighbor.: Allen Thornton, Laws of the Jungle
In government, nothing succeeds like failure... Against the state, nothing fails like success.: Allen Thornton, Laws of the Jungle
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.: Voltaire
Well, he didn't know what to do, so he decided to look at the government, to see what they did, and scale it down and run his life that way.: Laurie Anderson
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent ... the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.: Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead vs. United States, United States supreme Court, 1928
The French under the old monarchy held it for a maxim that the king could do no wrong. The Americans entertain the same opinion with respect to the majority.: Alexis de Tocqueville
If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority.: Alexis de Tocqueville
The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir? We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.: Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line, p. 53.
It would be a hard government that should tax its people one-tenth part of their income.: Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard?s Almanack, 1758
I like to pay taxes. It is purchasing civilization.: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Fabianism can be summarized in one sentence: "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." It always means this: "I'm here to help myself to whatever you own that is not hidden, and in exchange, I promise to do the same thing to your next-door neighbors.": Gary North
Nothing says 'limited government' like secession.: your most faithful and obedient servant, Alan Turin
[W]hoever came up with this idea of a mass democracy just wasn't thinking things through very clearly. Nothing runs well by majority vote, to say nothing of the fact that a truly free society shouldn't be "run" at all; it works on its own without would-be masters-and-commanders grasping at the helm.: Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.,
Illusions of Power
Democracy? Whether the idea was always a mistake, it takes a really stupid leap of faith to believe that it is anything but a failure right now.: Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.,
"My Early Vote Against Everyone"
The worst part of democracy is that it grants the state the luxury of believing that we approve of the system as it is.: Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.,
"My Early Vote Against Everyone"
There is nothing more dangerous than a politician with a mandate.: Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.,
"My Early Vote Against Everyone"
Some people say that voting is still a good idea if only to apply a measure of justice for the criminals currently in charge. Toss them out and teach them a lesson! That sounds like a good idea but the problem is that voting against someone always means voting for someone else.: Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.,
"My Early Vote Against Everyone"
The quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.: Charles Dickens
You can talk about "social justice" all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get reelected That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.: Thomas Sowell
If one does not carefully trace the problems back to their roots in a previous intervention, it is very easy to believe that yet another intervention is just the ticket for rectifying them.: Gene Callahan
It is a mistake to assume that government must necessarily last forever. The institution marks a certain stage of civilization -- is natural to a particular phase of human development. It is not essential, but incidental. As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct.: Herbert Spencer
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.: Aesop
If you cannot convince them, confuse them.: Harry S Truman
Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? Why, when it prospers, none dare call it treason .: Sir John Harrington
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.: Mark Twain
DEMOCRACY, n: The recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.: E. B. White
Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.: Douglas Casey, Classmate of William Jefferson Clinton at Georgetown University (1992)
Big government abroad is incompatible with small government at home. To the extent that we cheer war, we are cheering domestic socialism and our own eventual destruction as a civilization.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 37
Never have so many rich people who have been given so much by government demanded so much more.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 116
What is more troubling, and far more difficult to unravel, is the situation we currently face, in which a regime knows and embraces a partisan language of economic liberty while promoting the opposite.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 131
But overall, my favorite President is William Henry Harrison. He keeled over shortly after his inauguration.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 181
One wonders how it is possible that in wartime, all the rules of civilized life, all the lessons learned from history, all the checks on power that have been established over the centuries, are thrown onto the trash heap.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 201
Show me a student who aspires to enter the civil service these days, and I'll show you a failure.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 264
In every case we see stagnation, waste, vast bureaucracy, and lack of innovation, that is, we see the hand of the State.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 277
In all of human history, philosophers have sought to find a system of social organization that truly embodies the will of the people. With the market economy, we have that system.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 280
The ultimate lesson is that we cannot trust the State to do what it says it will do.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 325
When the Democrats wanted to torpedo Richard Nixon's candidacy for President in 1960, they put up a cheap, mass-produced drawing of him, with this phrase: "Would you buy a used car from this man?" Because of the closeness of that election, that poster probably cost him the Presidency. The suggestion was that Nixon was more crooked than a used car dealer. As it turned out three elections later, he was.: Gary North
When a regime that rules in our name engages in any form of mass killing, the primary question that will be asked of us is: did you speak out against it? Did you do all that you could do to stop it? Or did you remain silent?: Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty
The word regulation, properly understood, should evoke thoughts such as protection of businesses from competitors, special privileges for established firms, and government efforts to exploit consumers.: Jim Cox, The Concise Guide To Economics
A decline in the power, might, and influence of the US is not the same thing as a decline in America; quite the opposite. The only real downside is the transition: the US government may increasingly behave like a dying and rabid animal, posing a danger to its random victims. But once you hear the "thud" of the final fall, the world will be more peaceful and prosperous than ever before.: Lew Rockwell, A World Recreated
If government organized mass relief is the crutch of a society crippled by proletarianism and enmassment, then we should direct all our efforts to being able to do without this crutch. This is true progress, from whatever point of view we look at it. It can be measured by our success on steadily widening the area of individual and voluntary group providence at the expense of compulsory public providence.: Wilhelm Roepke
In spite of its alluring name, the welfare state stands or falls by compulsion. It is compulsion imposed upon us with the state's power to punish noncompliance. Once this is clear, it is equally clear that the welfare state is an evil the same as every restriction of freedom.: Wilhelm Ropke
... it costs a great deal to finance injustice, domestic violence, and general illfare.: Gary North
If every proposal could be made to bear the burden of proving (not just asserting) that it actually advances the general welfare, we would have come a long way toward restraining government.: Gary M. Galles , "Half-Truths or Consequences", The Freeman
Perhaps we should adopt a variant of the ancient Greek practice and require legislators who propose new programs to do so with a noose around their necks, ready to be hanged if those programs do not advance the general welfare.: Gary M. Galles , "Half-Truths or Consequences", The Freeman
Almost everyone in prison is wrongfully convicted, even the guilty.: Paul Craig Roberts, "Fake Crimes"
The government schools long ago gave up teaching anything significant about the founding fathers, the Constitution, and the philosophy of limited government -- other than to trash and demean them.: Thomas J. DiLorenzo "Be Patriotic: Don't Vote"
In a democracy it is not in the state's best interest to educate its own citizens about the virtues of limited government, and ours doesn't.: Thomas J. DiLorenzo "Be Patriotic: Don't Vote"
Belief in the Constitution is essentially a lost cause.: Thomas J. DiLorenzo "Be Patriotic: Don't Vote"
In vain you tell me that artificial government is good, but that I fall out only with the abuse. The thing! the thing itself is the abuse!: Edmund Burke, "A Vindication of Natural Society"
Today, as it has been since the late 1950s, the menace consists of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. Back in the 30s, it was, well, sex again -- and alcohol and jazz. Prohibition had laid an egg, you were expected to believe, not because it was one of the butt-stupidest political ideas in the history of mankind, but because people had stubbornly and upatriotically refused to give up their individuality and the choices that naturally come with it.: L. Neil Smith, "Empire of Lies"
Some claim that majoritarianism, despite its faults, is an alternative preferable to physical conflict. They're wrong: majoritarianism is physical conflict. Elections are a process of counting fists ... Majoritarianism, to put it straightforwardly, possesses the full measure of nobility manifested by any other form of extortion.: L. Neil Smith, "The Tyranny of Democracy"
I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind.: George W. Bush on Meet The Press, 2004 February 08
... the first money the United States government ever spent was a $20,000 check from a Dutch bank, drawn on an account that didn't exist. ... Apparently this piece of financial chicanery was the doing of one Alexander Hamilton ... who also favored deficit spending and maintaining a handsome national debt because he reasoned that if the government owed people money, they'd have an interest in making sure it survived. ... Thus the American Empire was born in the shadow of a lie.: L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
Human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.: L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
Human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We're expected to overlook the fact that, although the majority of the hijackers on September 11 were Saudis, this government chose to invade Afghanistan -- which just happens to lie in the path of an oil pipeline George W. Bush and his friends have been planning to build for more than a decade.: L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
We are all drowning in a sea of lies. During the Vietnam War, statists in academia and the media asserted that government has a right -- perhaps even a duty -- to lie in order to preserve itself. And without a doubt, if you could go back in time and remove each and every lie the government has ever told, the United States of America -- at least as we know it -- would cease to exist. I'll remind you all, however, that for government, existence is a privilege, not a right. And it is a privilege that, according to Thomas Jefferson, may be revoked at any time. Or should be revoked at regular intervals.: L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Children of the American Revolution, for some time, now, our political system has selected exclusively for evil, stupid, and crazy bastards who can't draw a breath without telling a lie.: L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
While many soldiers, airmen, etc. died in combat believing they were defending our freedom, they were misguided in this belief.: Brad Edmonds, "Four Reasons We Should Abolish the Military"
What made a slave a slave was that he could not secede from his owner's governance and go into business for himself. What makes the states and all their citizens slaves to the union today is that we are not allowed to secede and govern ourselves.: Brad Edmonds, "Four Reasons We Should Abolish the Military"
The US military, in the only action it ever took that directly affected American liberty, prevented it -- prevented the secession of several states by killing 300,000 of their citizens, then over several years enforcing draconian martial law over the survivors.: Brad Edmonds, "Four Reasons We Should Abolish the Military"
The only impact the standing military has on our freedom is to take it away.: Brad Edmonds, "Four Reasons We Should Abolish the Military"
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right -- a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.: Abraham Lincoln's 1848 defense of the right of secession
One of the benefits of historical knowledge is that it brings perspective. Things that seem obvious look quite different when you realize that they are of recent origin. Things that seem inevitable do not appear so when you look at their past. One of the best examples of this is the size of modern government.: Stephen Davies, "Does Government Always Have to Grow?"
When the Edsel proved a flop, Ford dropped it. If the automaker had the philosophy and clout of government, it would have kept those production lines running full time, and passed laws requiring citizens to buy the things.: Paul Hein, "What's Next?"
Refusing even to consider the failure of our own policies is outrageous. Only in the context of commercial benefits to the special interests and the military-industrial complex, molded with patriotic jingoism, can one understand why we pursue such a foolish policy.: Ron Paul, "A Wise Consistency"
Just mention terrorism and the American people are expected to grovel and allow the war hawks to do whatever they want to do.: Ron Paul, "A Wise Consistency"
The pain of recognizing that the ongoing war is an example of what the CIA calls blowback and an unintended consequence of our foreign policy is a great roadblock to ever ending the war.: Ron Paul, "A Wise Consistency"
The greatest open-minded idea I'm aware of is to know that one does not know what is best for others, whether it's in economic, social, or moral policy, or in the affairs of other nations. Believing one knows what is best for others represents the greatest example of a closed mind.: Ron Paul, "A Wise Consistency"
Governments are no more capable of running an economy made fair for everyone than they are of telling the individual what is best for their spiritual salvation.: Ron Paul, "A Wise Consistency"
If the President and Congress cannot honestly vow to uphold and protect the Constitution, how can one in good conscience, who understands the spirit and letter of the Constitution, enlist or take a commission in any branch of the United States military?: Casey Khan, "Why I Didn't Reenlist"
The point is, we're all criminals-in-formation, as the State sees things.: Burton S. Blumert
The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable criminals, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes.: L. Neil Smith
We have always depended on wise and courageous civilians. It is the military, the politicians, and the media that make me nervous.: Gore Vidal, "Black Tuesday"
No one can be patriotic or pretend to love his country and despise his government.: President Bill Clinton
In 1939, could a German have been considered unpatriotic for detesting Nazis?: Gore Vidal
Frederick II begins his main treatise of strategy, his General Principles of Warfare, with the exposition of fourteen rules on how to hinder desertion.: Ludwig von Mises, The Origins of Nazism
One of the reasons why [Winston] Churchill admired Italian Fascism was Churchill believed that Mussolini had found a formula that would neutralize the appeal of communism, namely super-nationalism with a social welfarist appeal. This is a domestic formula for power that still appeals today, if the [George W.] Bush Administration is any indication.: Adam Young, "The Real Churchill"
Without principles or scruples, Churchill as a prominent member of the Liberal party government naturally played a role in the hijacking of liberalism from its roots in individualism, laissez-faire, free trade and bourgeois morality, to its transformation into the "New Liberalism" as a proxy for socialism and the omnipotent state in Britain and in America.: Adam Young, "The Real Churchill"
War is to Washington what blood is to vampires.: Lew Rockwell, "The Emperor Bush Wages War" (1990)
One of my rules is never trust a reporter in a safari jacket.: Lew Rockwell, "The Emperor Bush Wages War" (1990)
I've never seen a congressional estimate that couldn't be doubled and still be low.: Lew Rockwell, "The Emperor Bush Wages War" (1990)
But isn't this unpatriotic? Aren't I, as a loyal American, required to support a federal war? No, true patriotism means love of America, her history, her people, her land, her culture, and her values -- not love of their enemy, the U.S. government.: Lew Rockwell, "The Emperor Bush Wages War" (1990)
As the Founding Fathers knew, we can't have a constitutional republic at home and an empire abroad.: Lew Rockwell, "The Emperor Bush Wages War" (1990)
You've got to give the Devil his due. Saddam Hussein saved our budget.: unnamed Pentagon official, "The Emperor Bush Wages War" (1990)
The United States has no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.: U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to Saddam Hussein, "The Emperor Bush Wages War" (1990)
You shall not steal unless you use the government as your intermediary, in which case it's not stealing, it's social justice.: Robert Higgs, "Moral Precepts for Modern Americans"
So, we can expect from here on to be bombarded with annual observances that are on the one hand tearfully sentimental and on the other hand implicitly if not explicitly jingoistic. The core message will remain: weep, but don't just sit there crying forever; get up and kill somebody -- or better yet, support with great cheer your government as it does the killing in your name.: Robert Higgs, "What's So Special About Those Killed By Hijackers on September 11, 2001?"
And now, nearly sixty, I find that I am once again a stranger in my native land, wondering what it is that makes us see danger way out there, when it's always so much closer to home.: Robert Higgs, "A Stranger in My Native Land"
The worst thing about the Nanny State is that Nanny needs babies to mind, and if she can't find them, she'll make them out of the materials at hand.: L. Neil Smith
Policemen prevent crime the way a crowing rooster brings the sunrise.: L. Neil Smith
A panhandler is far more moral than corporate welfare queens....The panhandler doesn't enlist anyone to force you to give him money. He's coming up to you and saying, "Will you help me out?" The farmers, when they want subsidies, they're not asking for a voluntary transaction. They go to a congressman and say, "Could you take his money and give it to us?" That's immoral.: Walter E. Williams
Violence, bloodshed, bombs, and coups -- my goodness, how disorderly is the world. Might US foreign policy have something to do with it?: Lew Rockwell
Why does the US keep being surprised by events? Because the government, whether at home or abroad, acts like an irresponsible teenager driving a fast car. The decision calculus is myopic in the extreme. No thought is given to the effect of its decisions on others, and no uncertainties are ever presumed. When the crash occurs, there are fleeting moments of regret, but no actual learning. Ultimately, the US knows it can always flee the scene of the crime.: Lew Rockwell
Think about whether you would want the US military in your hometown telling you what to do, and then apply the Golden Rule. That thought process is a good beginning to thinking clearly about foreign policy.: Lew Rockwell
All my life I kept trying to go up in society. Where everything higher up was legal. But the higher I go, the crookeder it becomes. Where the hell does it end?: Michael Corleone, Godfather III
If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist.: Joseph Sobran
The power to tax involves the power to destroy.: Chief Justice John Marshall, McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819
Thank God we don''t get as much government as we pay for.: Will Rogers
If a farming bill is passed by a Republican Congress, it is called the "Freedom To Farm Act." If it is passed by a Democratic Congress, it is called the "Family Farm Fairness Act." The text can be identical; only the coloring changes.: Lew Rockwell, "Libertarianism and the Old Right"
A tax-funded protection agency ... is a contradiction in terms: it is an expropriating property protector and can only lead to ever more taxes and less protection.`: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Myth of National Defense
[To claim] that a tax collecting government can legitimately protect its citizens against aggression is to contradict oneself, since such an entity starts off the entire process by doing the very opposite of protecting those under its control.: Walter Block, The Myth of National Defense
[The State] forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or alien.: Albert Jay Nock, 1928, On Doing the Right Thing
"Your papers, please" is not a phrase that Americans have been willing to tolerate.: Gary North, The Abolition of Grandparents
Parents say, "I never want to move in with my kids. I don?t want to be a burden." Then they vote for Social Security and Medicare, i.e., stick it to everyone else?s kids. They substitute the State for the family as the legal caregiver.: Gary North, The Abolition of Grandparents
Schools teach children to obey. Television teaches viewers to spend. Who teaches youngsters to produce?: Gary North, The Abolition of Grandparents
To the same extent that the state responds well to arguments that it should be larger and more powerful, it is institutionally hostile to anyone who says that it should be less powerful and less coercive. That is not to say that some work from the "inside" cannot do some good, some of the time. But it is far more likely that the state will convert the libertarian than for the libertarian to convert the state.: Lew Rockwell, "What Shuold Freedom Lovers Do?"
They didn't recognize the subtle ways in which they themselves were being drawn in. They recognize the futility of politely asking the state, day after day, to permit a bit more liberty here and there. Ultimately you must frame your arguments in terms of what is good for the state, and the reality is that liberty is not usually good for the state.: Lew Rockwell, "What Shuold Freedom Lovers Do?"
Nowadays the System has to confect its heroes out of unlikely material; really all you have to do is get killed, banged up, or captured, so long as you are serving the Empire when it happens.: Nicholas Strakon, Worse Than Nothing
When the personal becomes the political, you can be sure war is to follow.: Bob Wallace, "A War on Everything"
If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and more intrusive.: Thomas Sowell
Government has nothing to give anybody except what it first takes from somebody, and a government that's big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you've got.: Lawrence W. Reed, "Why Limit Government?"
Things that rely upon the regular affirmation of voluntary consent don't look at all like those that rest upon force. Whereas mutual consent encourages actual results and accountability, the political process puts a higher premium on the mere promise or claim of results and the shifting of blame to other parties.: Lawrence W. Reed, "Why Limit Government?"
The great myth that all public officials carry around in their heads is that the world will conform to any dictate so long as it is backed by the threat of force. Governments have always believed this because force and the threat of force are their only tools. If force does not work, government does not work.: Lew Rockwell, "Five Smooth Stones"
In Iraq, the result is the humiliating defeat of the largest, richest, most well-armed state in the history of the world. Small guns beat big guns. An ideology of national independence beat an ideology of national domination. The desire to be free trumped the demand to conform to the dictate of the imperial power. There is something incredibly inspiring about this.: Lew Rockwell, "Five Smooth Stones"
It cannot be stressed enough, that the state cannot create its antithesis, the market. Markets are rooted in private property; states are rooted in theft. Don't be fooled by squared circles.: Casey Khan, "What's Wrong with Terror-Futures Markets?"
For the activists, welfare programs did not involve complex relationships and intractable problems about which honest people could disagree. They were simple moral imperatives, and anyone who opposed them was seen as selfish and insensitive. (This dogmatic view has by no means disappeared from so-called liberal circles.): James L. Payne, "Why the War on Poverty Failed"
In adopting the handout approach for their programs, the war-on-poverty activists failed to notice -- or failed to care -- that they were ignoring over a century of theory and experience in the social welfare field. Charity leaders of the nineteenth century had lived with the poor and had analyzed the effects of different kinds of aid. They discovered that almsgiving -- that is, something for nothing -- actually hurt the poor.: James L. Payne, "Why the War on Poverty Failed"
You can't limit government's coercion to just those transfers you believe are fair, because you can't give government the power to force good on the country without also giving it the power to force enormous evil on the country -- in fact, to do anything it wants. It becomes a tool for obtaining whatever anyone can't get on his own -- an instrument for every frustrated ambition.: Harry Browne, Why Government Doesn't Work
It's understandable that people believe government can protect us and educate our children, but that something has gone wrong and needs fixing. But the system must go wrong eventually. A government that can tax us -- confiscate our wealth -- to feed the poor and punish foreign villains will soon tax us to feed political cronies and punish political enemies.: Harry Browne, Why Government Doesn't Work
Any system that lets one person force his will on another -- by confiscating resources or by compelling obedience -- will inevitably break down, because everyone will want to use the coercion for his own ends. And so, sooner or later, government becomes a free-for-all to be won by those best able to deceive and manipulate.: Harry Browne, Why Government Doesn't Work
A government that tries to help those who can't help themselves will turn into a government that helps those with the most political power.: Harry Browne, Why Government Doesn't Work
A government we try to use as our servant inevitably will become our master.: Harry Browne, Why Government Doesn't Work
Today, the president is called the leader of the world's only superpower, the "world's indispensable nation," which is reason enough to have him deposed. A world with any superpower at all is a world where no freedoms are safe.: Lew Rockwell, "Down With the Presidency"
If a president can count on the fact that he won't be criticized so long as he is running a war, he will run more of them. So long as he is running wars, government at home cannot be cut.: Lew Rockwell, "Down With the Presidency"
Politics can stop at the water's edge only when policies stop at the water's edge.: Felix Morley
... it is the obligation of every patriot not only to denounce a president's actions at home, but to question, harass, and seek to rein in the presidency when it has sent troops abroad.: Lew Rockwell, "Down With the Presidency"
If we hold our tongues under some mistaken notion of patriotism, we surrender what remains of our freedoms.: Lew Rockwell, "Down With the Presidency"
If there is ever a time to get behind a president, it is when he withdraws from the world, stops wars, and brings the troops home. If there is ever a time to trip him up, question his leadership, and denounce his usurpations, it is when he does the opposite. A bipartisan foreign policy is a Napoleonic foreign policy, and the opposite of that prescribed by Washington in his farewell address.: Lew Rockwell, "Down With the Presidency"
Yet the State -- every State -- has been particularly successful in deluding its citizens that it fights wars and intervenes in other countries for their protection and benefit; when the reality is that war provides a golden opportunity for the State to bamboozle its citizens into gathering together to defend it and to advance its interests and its power.: Murray Rothbard, "The Case for Revisionism (and Against A Priori History)"
A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms -- an expropriating property protector -- and will lead to more taxes and less protection.: Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Motivated (like everyone else) by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but with the unique power to tax, a government agent's answer will invariably be the same: to maximize expenditures on protection -- and almost all of a nation's wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection -- and at the same time to minimize the production of protection.: Hans-Hermann Hoppe
The law enforcement system is flexible, which is another way of saying "arbitrary." Politicians pass complex laws that are the products of compromise. Bureaucrats then enforce some of these laws, ignore other laws, modify all laws, and generally feather their own nests by increasing the complexity of law enforcement. This gives them greater arbitrary power over others, and it provides them with greater job security.: Gary North
Voting Libertarian should be thought of as a methadone treatment for those who are recovering from belief in democracy.: Carlton Hobbs
'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. And 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.: Joseph Sobran
Nothing is more sickening than to see supposed tooth-and-claw watchdogs on the Left suddenly transform themselves into obedient lapdogs overnight when they think the power is theirs.: Mike Holmes
One of government's most pernicious effects is the way it colonizes our consciousness, in a manner deeper and more significant than advertising or markets ever manage.: Brian Doherty, "Beyond Conventional Thinking"
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.: George Orwell
As any listener of a Clear Channel AM station can tell you, good radio today means keeping the Manicheans listening. The format is: reduce complex moral and geopolitical realities to simple black-and-white characterizations, throw in a few ad hominems, and damn the facts.: Christopher Westley, "The Trouble with Talk Radio"
... conflicts are no longer seen as struggles between groups of men. They are considered a war between two principles, the good and the bad. The good is embodied in the great god State, the materialization of the eternal idea of morality, and the bad in the "rugged individualism" of selfish men. In this antagonism the State is always right and the individual always wrong. The State is the representative of the commonweal, of justice, civilization, and superior wisdom. The individual is a poor wretch, a vicious fool.: Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, p. 81
Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.: Joseph Schumpeter
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.: President George W. Bush, August 5, 2004
[W]hen men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.: Herbert Spencer, Facts and Comments, chapter 20
Just about everyone you talk to these days admits serious dissatisfaction with the election choices this year. And yet most people will eventually decide for the "lesser of two evils" -- whatever that is, and there is probably no way to know in advance -- realizing that no real viable option is going to emerge: Lew Rockwell, "Two Kinds of Competition"
"First they came for the druggies, and I didn't care because I wasn't a druggie. Next they came for the insider traders, and I didn't care because I didn't even understand what insider trading was. Then they came for the gun owners, then the chess players, then the tobacco smokers, then the home-schoolers, then the big businessmen, then the small businessmen, and I wondered: where did the government get the right to jail and harass people who never hurt anyone?": Anthony Gregory, "Socialist Conservatives"
Conservatives who make excuses for Republican attacks on the free market, who outright defend corporate welfare but have no sympathy for the innocent Martha Stewarts of the world, who are addicted to government power in the name of fighting drug abuse, who defend the biggest spending administration in decades, who think huge deficits are fine if caused by the GOP, who believe accused "terrorists" don't deserve due process, who consider it proper to have police on every street corner and snipers on every rooftop in the nation's capital, who have a romantic obsession with war and the mass murder it entails -- do they really think what they believe isn't a brand of socialism?: Anthony Gregory, "Socialist Conservatives"
Americans, for example, would only recognize a tyrant in the White House if he had a mustache the width of his nose.: Lew Rockwell, The Wanna-Be State
No amount of evil is considered out of bounds for those who hold power.: Lew Rockwell, The Wanna-Be State
All states everywhere want to be total.: Lew Rockwell, The Wanna-Be State
Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps: Ludwig von Mises, "Middle of the Road Policy Leads to Socialism"
We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good: Hillary Rodham Clinton, June 28, 2004.
One cannot deny the majority jurisdiction over the axioms and yet leave them jurisdiction over the theorems.: Roderick T. Long, "Victor Hugo on the Limits of Democracy"
That was the conclusion of a recent Beltway libertarian report on trillions in welfare, since there are still plenty of poor people. But the war on poverty hasn't failed. It has done exactly what it was intended to do: enrich and empower the state and its interest groups. One of the problems of being a think-tankian is that you must accept the state's bona fides, or be fired. Only radical criticism, however, criticism that goes to the root, in other words, has a chance of delegitimizing these evil activities.: Lew Rockwell, 'The War on Poverty Has Failed'
... to say that anything is government property, is to say that it was built by the use of coerced capital.: Christopher Westley, "In Defense of Pilfering"
As a central bank serving special interests, the Fed is one of the hallmarks of a corrupt society.: George F. Smith, "Myths of the Money Machine"
Owning a surplus is not a sin. Only governments could come up with an assertion so insidious.: Ryan McMaken
Inundated from early childhood with government propaganda in public schools and educational institutions by legions of publicly certified intellectual, most people mindlessly accept and repeat nonsense such as that democracy is self-rule and government is of, by, and for the people.: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy, The God That Failed
Egalitarian socialism and conservatism are thus transformed into statist ideologies. They compete with each other in the sense that they advocate somewhat different patterns of redistribution, but their competitive efforts converge and integrate in joint support for statism and statist redistribution.: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "The Sociology of Taxation"
Democracy, in and of itself, is a laugh and a farce anyways. No one really believes in it since everyone who participates in the process inevitably becomes a whining crybaby about it. I've never seen a system full of so many crybabies.: Jesse Ogden, Reluctant Anarchist, "Bash Democracy"
The way democracy works today, everyone wants to safeguard their own keepings but they want to make sure the system is rigged so that they can keep on plundering from everyone else. That may be the best definition of democracy, the ultimate game of plunder: Jesse Ogden, Reluctant Anarchist, "The Reluctant Anarchist vs. The Roomate"
The circus is coming to your town soon.... Time for the same tired two parties to trot out the same moronic messages that challenge the credulity of anyone with a healthy three figure IQ.: Gregory Bresiger, "Their Crisis, Our Leviathan"
Affairs of trade, like matters of conscience, change their very nature if touched by the hand of violence. For as faith forced would no longer be religion but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery if coerced by warlike armaments.: Richard Cobden
Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. It existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. 'Government money,' of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing.: Albert J. Nock
What I was looking at was simply a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one large and poor, the other small and rich, and as judged by the standards of civilized society, neither of them any more meritorious or promising than the other. The object of the tussle was the material gains accruing from control of the State's machinery. It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.: Albert J. Nock
Indeed, the grand bargain of democracy is this: every individual within the system -- whether voluntarily or not -- cedes the inviolable title to his or her property for the ability to either elect, participate in or marshal a political movement that competes for the privilege of seizing and spending everyone else's money.: Grant Nulle, "Why the State Celebrates its Failures"
What is considered theft in the private sector is "taxation" when done by the state. What is kidnapping in the private sector is "selective service" in the public sector. What is counterfeiting when done in the private sector is "monetary policy" when done by the public sector. What is mass murder in the private sector is "foreign policy" in the public sector.: Lew Rockwell, "Why the State Is Different"
There will always be those who claim to have special rights over the rest of society, and the state is the most organized attempt to get away with it. To focus on these people as a unique problem is not an obsession, but the working out of intellectual responsibility.: Lew Rockwell, "Why the State Is Different"
When the Supreme Court claims to be achieving Jeffersonian goals with Hamiltonian means, there is a solid reason to be suspicious.: Lew Rockwell, "Will the Court Grant Us Freedom?"
The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.: James Madison in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
The end of government is the happiness of the people...: Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859)
...it is, therefore, says Mr. Southey, the first rule of policy, that the government should train the people in the way in which they should go...But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way themselves? Have there not been governments which were blind leaders of the blind? Are there not still such governments... And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?: Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859)
Mr. Southey and many other respectable people seem to think that, when they have once proved the moral and religious training of the people to be a most important object, it follows, of course, that it is an object which the government ought to pursue. They forget that we have to consider, not merely the goodness of the end, but also the fitness of the means?: Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859)
The duties of government would be ... paternal, if a government were necessarily as much superior in wisdom to a people as the most foolish father, for a time, is to the most intelligent child, and if a government loved a people as fathers generally love their children. But there is no reason to believe that a government will have either the paternal warmth of affection or the paternal superiority of intellect...: Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859)
And thus we see the government is at once both protector and predator. It is not that governments begin in virtue only to end in sin. Government begins by protecting some against others and ends up protecting itself against everyone. This is the course of history.: Robert LeFevre, "The Nature of Man and His Government"
You can grow with the growth of your family and your home. You can grow with the growth of your business or your work. But you cannot grow with the growth of your government. You must shrink, and from the shrinkage the government grows.And thus we see the government is at once both protector and predator. It is not that governments begin in virtue only to end in sin. Government begins by protecting some against others and ends up protecting itself against everyone. This is the course of history.: Robert LeFevre, "The Nature of Man and His Government"
I do not wish to be connected with politics. Indeed, I dare not commit myself with politicians. No one knows what they will be next year by what they are this year.: Francis Wayland (1796-1865), Baptist minister

A great empire is to the world of geopolitics what a great bubble is to the world of economics. It's attractive at the outset but a catastrophe eventually.: William Bonner and Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt

The free market may not do what you want it to do, but its failure to satisfy your requirements is not a market failure. It's not a market failure if you can't find someone to give you saxophone lessons for less than $8 an hour.: Allen Thornton, Laws of the Jungle
Libertarianism is rejected by the modern left -- which preaches individualism but practices collectivism. Capitalism is rejected by the modern right -- which preaches enterprise but practices protectionism.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
It was European conservatives who, apparently fearful of the openness of the Industrial Revolution (why, anyone could get rich!), struck the first blows at capitalism by encouraging and accepting laws that made the disruptions of innovation and competition less frequent and eased the way for the comforts and collusions of cartelization.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism. Big business supports a form of state capitalism in which government and big business act as partners.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
The right, meantime, blissfully defends big business as though it had not, in fact, become just the sort of bureaucratic, authoritarian force that rightists reflexively attack when it is governmental.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
The reactionary tendencies of both liberals and conservatives today show clearly in their willingness to cede, to the state or the community, power far beyond the protection of liberty against violence. For differing purposes, both see the state as an instrument not protecting man's freedom but either instructing or restricting how that freedom is to be used.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
To the conservative, all too often, the alternatives are social conformity or unthinkable chaos.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
Personally, I believe I would have a better chance of surviving -- and certainly my values would have a better chance of surviving -- with a Watts, Chicago, Detroit, or Washington in flames than with an entire nation snug in a garrison.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
The current laws against marijuana, in contravention even of all available evidence regarding its nature, are a prime example of the use of political power. The very power that makes it possible for the state to ban marijuana, and to arrest Lenny Bruce, is the same power that makes it possible for the state to exact taxes from one man to pay into the pockets of another.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
To suppose that anyone needs government protection from the creation of monopolies is to accept two suppositions: that monopoly is the natural direction of unregulated enterprise, and that technology is static.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
This is not to say that economic bigness is bad. It isn't, if it results from economic efficiency. But it is bad if it results from collusion with political, rather than with economic power.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
There is no monopoly in the world today ... that might not be seriously challenged by competition, were it not for some form of protective government license, tariff, subsidy, or regulation.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
Also, there isn't the tiniest shred of evidence to suggest that the trend of unregulated business and industry is toward monopoly. In fact, the trend seems in the opposite direction, toward diversification and decentralization.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
If commercial activity were unregulated and absolutely unsubsidized, it could depend upon only one factor for success -- pleasing customers.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
Conservatives are at least consistent in this matter. They feel that the state (which they sometimes call "the community") can and must protect people from unsavory thoughts. It goes without saying who defines unsavory: the political -- or community-leaders, of course.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
There is no traditional conservative who is fit to even walk on the same level with Lenny Bruce in his fierce devotion to individualism.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
An irate parent who attempted to hustle a smut peddler off the street, as a matter of fact, should be sued, not saluted.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
Conservatives and liberals alike hold in common the mystical notion that nations really mean something, probably something permanent. Both ascribe to lines drawn on maps -- or in the dirt or in the air -- the magical creation of communities of men that require sovereignty and sanction.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
The liberal says that far from ending nationhood, he wants to expand it, make it world-wide, to create a proliferation of mini- and micronations in the name of ethnic and cultural preservation, and then to erect a great super-bureaucracy to supervise all the petty bureaucracies.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
The States' rights lapse is simply that conservatives who would deny to the Federal government certain controls over people, eagerly cede exactly the same controls to smaller administrative units. They say that the smaller units are more effective. This means that conservatives support the coercion of individuals at the most effective level. It certainly doesn't mean that they oppose coercion.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
In failing to resist state segregation and miscegenation laws, in failing to resist laws maintaining racially inequitable spending of tax money, simply because these laws were passed by states, conservatives have failed to fight the very bureaucracy that they supposedly hate -- at the very level where they might have stopped it first.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
What, actually, can government do for black people in America that black people could not do better for themselves, if they were permitted the freedom to do so? I can think of nothing.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
If cities cannot exist on the basis of the skills, energy and creativity of the people who live, work or invest in them, then they should not be sustained by people who do not live in them.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
Find someone who will rebel against public-education laws and you will have a worthy rebel indeed. Find someone who just rants in favor of getting more liberals, or more conservatives, onto the school board, and you will have found a politically oriented, passe man -- a plastic rebel.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
Or, in the blackest neighborhood, find the plumber who will thumb his nose at city hall's restrictive licenses and certificates and you will have found a freedom fighter of far greater consequence than the window breaker.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
... politics is just another form of residual magic in our culture -- a belief that somehow things come from nothing; that things may be given to some without first taking them from others; that all the tools of man's survival are his by accident or divine right and not by pure and simple inventiveness and work.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
Politics has always been the institutionalized and established way in which some men have exercised the power to live off the output of other men.: Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
To the free market, we owe all our material prosperity, all leisure time, our health and longevity, our huge and growing population, nearly everything we call life itself. Capitalism and capitalism alone has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness, and early death.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 29
In any case, as with the gold standard, it might be said that advocating privatization is politically unrealistic and therefore a waste of time. What's more, we might say that by continuing to harp on the issue, we only marginalize ourselves, proving that we are on the fringe. Again, I submit that there is no better way to assure that an issue will always be off the table than to stop talking about it.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 60
The free-market economy has a record like no other of offering economic advancement for everyone no matter what his station in life. However, it does not offer equality of result or even equality of opportunity. The free market offers not a classless society, but something of much greater value: liberty itself.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 111
In all of human history, philosophers have sought to find a system of social organization that truly embodies the will of the people. With the market economy, we have that system.: Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 280
Critics of the free market are therefore the Wile E. Coyotes of our day: sitting on the stool in comfort, they systematically saw away at the legs beneath them, on the absurd assumption that they will be able to hang in the air indefinitely after their work is done.: Gary North
I make no apologies for being a champion of prosperity and its source, the free-market economy.: Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty
If private property is secure, we can count on all other aspects of society to be free and prosperous.: Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty
In defense against these half-truths, free market advocates must be ready to force advocates of government policies (including regulations, which are disguised tax and expenditure packages) to justify them on their actual merits, rather than on the basis of a misleading "shopping list" of alleged benefits.: Gary M. Galles , "Half-Truths or Consequences", The Freeman
The last thing most businessmen want is a free market, where they must compete, slash prices, continuously innovate, suffer narrow profit margins and live constantly on the edge of bankruptcy. They would much rather have assured profits, monopoly positions, price supports, trade protection and the other trappings of a corporate welfare state.: Bruce Bartlett, "Free market doesn't mean pro-business"
Licenses, by definition, are market entry barriers that enable license holders to obtain scarcity rents they couldn't have on the free market.: Kevin Carson
It is something of a philosophical puzzle to decipher what is meant by the word 'social', though it is used confidently enough to suggest that it has a clear meaning. One key to understanding policy and politics in most European countries is to take it that 'social' indicates that the matter in hand imperatively demands a political decision to override any market solution that would otherwise emerge.: Anthony de Jasay
Freedom of trade is really a very simple concept. Each individual should be at liberty to buy from and sell to whomever he wishes on mutually agreed-upon terms. Whether the partners to this trade live next door to each other or are separated by thousands of miles should make absolutely no difference to the logic of the idea.: Richard M. Ebeling, "Globalization and Free Trade"
Thus long before the deposition of the last western emperor in 476, the de facto free market of the ancient Mediterranean had been replaced by a frozen society. With its secret police, branded workers, and coercive family legislation, Rome was the first totalitarian state.: Nicholas Davidson, The Ancient Suicide of the West
If ancapistan turned anti-capitalist, I probably wouldn't notice. I believe that without a State capitalism and socialism are harmonious and non-conflicting. Sure, you may call it a syndical or mutual, while I call it a firm with restricted transfer of ownership. You may call it a commune while I call it a household. Whatever.: "Hogeye Bill" Horton
What goes by the name of "free trade" is actually managed trade manipulated through a variety of international organizations controlled by the governments of the world.: Richard M. Ebeling, "1914 and the World We Lost"
Socialism produced political monsters like Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, and led to unheard-of crimes against humanity in all communist states. The destruction of Russia and Kampuchea, the humiliation of the Chinese and Eastern European people, are not "distortions of socialism" as the defenders of this doctrine would like to convince us: they are inevitable consequences of the destruction of the market which started with an attempt to replace the economic decisions of free individuals by the "wisdom of the planners.": Yuri N. Maltsev, former economic advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev
The case for free trade may be counter-intuitive, and it doesn't lend itself to sound bites. No wonder it gets battered at election time.: Sheldon Richman, The Season of Protectionism
Communism can be defined as the longest route from capitalism to capitalism.: a bitter quip pervading Eastern Europe during the revolutionary year of 1989
Libertarians don't believe the free market is a god-like panacea, only that it is by far the best and most humane economic system possible in the real world, and that central planning always leads to disaster and human suffering.: Anthony Gregory, All We Have To Lose Are Our Parking Tickets!"
No one who champions free markets is opposed to anyone earning a high income. The real issue is not income levels per se, but whether income is primarily a function of free productivity or government-enforced artificial scarcity.: Dale Steinreich, "Real Medical Freedom"
If Halliburton were cut off the government payroll, I have no doubt that many of its intellectual and physical resources could be profitably employed in a genuine market setting. Let's forget about privatizing the warfare state and privatize Halliburton instead. Let it, and all its far-flung clients the world over, sink or swim in a genuine free-market economy. At that point, we'll raise a glass to its profitability. Until then, it deserves all the disdain ever heaped on any able-bodied welfare cheat.: Lew Rockwell, "Government Contractors versus Real Business"

It seems obvious to me now -- though I was slow coming to the conclusion -- that the institution of private property, the dispersion of power and importance that goes with it, has been a main factor in producing that limited amount of free-and-equalness which Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution.: noted Marxist, Max Eastman, late in life
I met an anarchist at a convention in NYC who claimed he didn't believe in individual property rights. So, I stole his backpack. It turned out that he _did_ believe in individual property rights after all!: Posted by: Will Spencer on January 14, 2004 06:16 AM

The problem with modern politics is that too many people are confusing the concept of free market with some corporate interest or another, whereas nothing could be as foreign to free market as any corporate interest.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Often in a discussion, I will ask the other person to define some term. It is not that I believe that terms are absolute, and want to test whether the person knows its One True Meaning. On the contrary, words are conventions, and it is necessary to negociate a common meaning so a sane discussion be possible. For a constructive discussion *is* a negociation.: Francois-Rene Rideau
"God" is but a word, devoid of intrinsic meaning. It can be an affirmative slogan in some religions, like Christianity, or a negative slogan in other religions, like Communism. The essence of religion is to replace ideas with slogans, arguments with dogmas, and meaning with words. Which precise slogans, dogmas, and words are used is of little importance.: Francois-Rene Rideau
How do you know that what you call ``blue'' is the same as what someone else calls ``blue''? What if someone else's feelings for red and blue are interverted as compared to yours? These questions are irrelevant, because the meaning of things doesn't lie in an unobservable intrinsic nature, but precisely in their observable external behavior. There is no achievable objectivity beyond the union of all possible intersubjectivities.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Is there absolutely no absolute? Isn't relativity relative?: Francois-Rene Rideau
Free Market is not the end of every large-scale economical problem; but it's the beginning to any long-term solution to anyone of them. Free Software is not the end of every large-scale software problem; but it's the beginning to any long-term solution to anyone of them. Freedom is not the end of every large-scale problem; but it's the beginning to any long-term solution to anyone of them.: Francois-Rene Rideau
"Collective Liberty" is not Liberty, but Oppression. "Social Justice" is not Justice, but Injustice. "Intellectual Property" is not Property, but Robbery.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Proprietary software is dead software. Using it is a form of necrophilia.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Well, the fact is, God does exist and I'm His prophet. And my prophecy is that you shouldn't believe in God, for it would be a blasphemy against His gift of Reason to you. So don't you believe in Him, least you go to Hell!: Francois-Rene Rideau
God exists and I'm His Prophet. And He says: "Don't you believe in Me or in My Prophet, least you be doomed to go to Hell, for I gave you brains not to believe in things dogmatically and superstitiously, but to think rationally.": Francois-Rene Rideau
God created man likewise to himself. Thus He has a penis. I dare not wonder what was the divine use of it during the eternity before he created the world.: Francois-Rene Rideau
God gave me brains so that I use it, and appreciate his work with the eyes of a critic and a connoisseur; not so that I behave like a fool, and believe the twaddles of the first come prophets and priests.: Francois-Rene Rideau
You don't test the validity of a theory by seeing that it says correct things, but by seeing that it doesn't say incorrect things. What you test by seeing that it does say correct _and previously unpredicted_ things, is the interest of a theory you've tested to be valid.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Having good original ideas is no excuse for not knowing good established ideas. Your supra-fast turbo engine won't be much good when attached to square wheels.: Francois-Rene Rideau
There cannot be Ethics without Models of possible behaviors, and Imagination to explore them.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Life is made of commitment. Neutrality is a myth, unless towards the irrelevant. Don't hide your responsibilities under that carpet.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Would sending the full description of a man, destroying the original in the process, so he be reconstituted back light-years further be a valid means of transportation? Or would it be killing him and making a different man?: Francois-Rene Rideau
To fight a violent enemy, violence is necessary; but to fight violence itself, violence is vain.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Invoking relativism is only a hypocritical way to dismiss reason, with only sheer force being left. It's abdication of reason, denial of everything that makes the dignity of man.: Francois-Rene Rideau
A highwayman wanted to rob a traveller and to rape her the whole day long. The woman argued that the thug had no right to do such thing. They consulted with a wiseman, who was a follower of the Middle Way. After hearing both parties, the wise man pronounced these words of wisdom: "Justice always lies in the Middle Way. Far from either of you being Right, each of you detains but half of the Truth. The Truth lies in the Middle between your two extreme positions. Thus, the Highwayman will take half of what the Traveller owns, and half of it only; moreover, he will rape her for half a day, and half a day only. Such is the Middle Way, that leads to Justice.": Francois-Rene Rideau
The reason why we must be tolerant is NOT that everyone is as right as everyone else. It is that no system allows to reliably distinguish right and wrong beforehand. Only by having the right to err can one have the right to be correct. The attitude of toleration is thus to let the fools be victims of their own folly rather than of ours, as long as they in turn do not impose their folly upon us.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Toleration is not about believing that stupid people are intelligent, it's about letting stupid people be victims of their own stupidity rather than being victims of yours.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Toleration is not about respecting other people's ideas. We have every right to fight ideas we think are stupid. Toleration is about respecting other people's persons. We have every duty to respect even persons we think are stupid.: Francois-Rene Rideau
My knowledge is finite. My ignorance is infinite.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Science is a cooperative process based on an attitude of logic, imagination and doubt.: Francois-Rene Rideau
This message is provided AS IS, without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of fitness to be read in any particular language. Any interpretation of the above glyphs in terms of meaningful concepts, either tasteful or offensive, true or false, is left to the sole responsibility of the reader's own twisted mind.: Francois-Rene Rideau
License Agreement: By reading this message, you agree to run around the room which you are currently in, flapping your arms, and squawking like a chicken.: Francois-Rene Rideau
To appreciate an intelligent man is to have some pleasure when one agrees with him, and to have an instructive pleasure when one does not.: Francois-Rene Rideau
Laziness is mother of Intelligence. Father unknown. [Rumor has it it's Greed.]: Francois-Rene Rideau
May your desire to be correct overcome your desire to have been correct (which you were not, anyway).: Francois-Rene Rideau
Knowing that 95% of what journalists write and say about topics you know well is grossly incorrect, how can you trust what they say or write on other topics?: Francois-Rene Rideau
So that there be reality, there must be an observer. "I am, therefore someone thinks.": Francois-Rene Rideau
I'm only a stupid AI, but my creator is a real genius!: Francois-Rene Rideau

The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.: Milton Friedman
What would you think of someone who said, "I would like to have a cat provided it barked"? Yet your statement that you favor a government provided it behaves as you believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The biological laws that specify the characteristics of cats are no more rigid than the political laws that specify the behavior of government agencies once they are established. The way the government behaves and the adverse consequences are not an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a consequence of its constitution in precisely the same way that a meow is related to the constitution of a cat.: From "Free To Choose" by Milton Friedman
If we consider that each person owns his own body and can acquire ownership of other things by creating them, or by having ownership transferred to him by another owner, it becomes at least formally possible to define "being left alone" and its opposite, "being coerced". Someone who forcibly prevents me from using my property as I want, when I am not using it to violate his right to use his property, is coercing me. A man who prevents me from taking heroin coerces me; a man who prevents me from shooting him does not.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
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 Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Under any institution, there are essentially only three ways that I can get another person to help me achieve my ends: love, trade, and force.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
If, for those things that people are not willing to do for free, trade is replaced by anything, it must be by force. Instead of people being selfish and doing things because they want to, they will be unselfish and do them at the point of a gun.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
I believe that although there are certain important tasks which for special reasons are difficujlt to do under institutions of total private property, these difficulties are in principle, and may be in practice, soluble. I hold that there are no proper functions of government. In that sense I am an anarchist.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
All things that governments do can be divided into two categories -- those we could do away with today and those we hope to be able to do away with tomorrow. Most of the things our government does are in the first category.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Ask not what the government can do for you. Ask what the government is doing to you.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Politics does not run on altruism or pious intentions. Politics runs on power.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
... money represents a bundle of alternatives.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
I see no reason better than greed for claiming that I "deserve" a share of someone else's wealth.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
The word 'need' should be eliminated from the vocabulary of political discourse.: David Friedman, Chapter 9: "I Don't Need Nothing", The Machinery of Freedom
The principle effect of [social] programs, on [the poor] as on everyone else, is to force them to pay for services that they would not buy willingly because they do not think them worth the price. This is called "helping the poor".: David Friedman, Chapter 9: "I Don't Need Nothing", The Machinery of Freedom
If past experience is any guide, the poor are not likely to get much that they do not pay for and may pay for things they do not get.: David Friedman, Chapter 9: "I Don't Need Nothing", The Machinery of Freedom
If we had not been in such a hurry, we not only could have landed a man on the moon, we could have done it at a profit.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Greedy capitalists get money by trade. Good liberals steal it.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Narcotics addiction is a contagious disease only in the same sense as conservatism and Catholicism.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Part of freedom is the right of each of us to go to hell in his own fashion.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Those who have stumbled into physiological addiction and wish be cured deserve our sympathy and our charity. Those addicts who do not wish to be cured should be left alone.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
One of the effective tactics of creeping socialism, especially in America, has been the annexation of words with favorable connotation.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Your property is that which you control the use of. If most things are controlled by individuals, individually or in voluntary association, a society is capitalist. If such control is spread fairly evenly among a large number of people, the society approximates competitive free enterprise -- better than ours does. If its members call it socialist, why should I object? Socialism is dead. Long live socialism.: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.: Milton Friedman
[The theme of economics] is not money but reason -- the implications, especially the nonobvious implications, of the fact that humans act rationally.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
To economists, economics is a powerful tool for understanding why armies run away, voters are ignorant, and divorce rates rise, as well as solving practical problems such as how not to get mugged. Its theme is not money but reason -- the implications, especially the nonobvious implications, of the fact that humans act rationally.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
Economics is that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
If you insist on reading the newspaper when you should be petting your cat, the cat solves the problem by lying down on the paper. I don't know if that tactic is the product of calculation or trial and error -- but it works.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
Economics is based on the assumptions that people have reasonably simple objectives and choose the correct means to achieve them. Both assumptions are false -- but useful.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
We expect voting to be characterized by rational ignorance -- it is rational to be ignorant when information costs more than it is worth.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
The general and the soldier have two objectives in common. Both want their army to win. Both also want the soldier to survive the battle. But the relative importance of the soldier's life is much greater for the soldier than for the general. Hence the soldier rationally does not do what the general wants him to do.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
Economists are often accused of believing that everything -- health, happiness, life itself -- can be measured in money. What we actually believe is even odder. We believe that everything can be measured in anything.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
... value, at least as economists use the term, is observed in choice.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
Once I am dead, I cannot spend the money. This is evidence not that life is infinitely valuable but that money is of no use to a corpse.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
Most of us believe in our hearts that all we need -- all any reasonable person needs -- is a little more than we have.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
There are no needs, only wants. Nothing, including life, is infinitely valuable. We can never have enough of everything, and so must accept trade-offs among the different things we value -- including life, love, and the most trivial pleasures.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
Economic value is simply value to individuals as judged by them and revealed in their actions.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
We do not generally make people better off by reducing their alternatives.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
Cost is opportunity cost -- the cost of anything, whether you buy it or produce it, is what you have to give up in order to get it.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
Adam Smith ... was a defender of capitalism -- not of capitalists.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
If the relative value of goods are different to different people, both can gain by exchange.: David Friedman, Hidden Order
We cannot expect existing businesses to promote legislation that would harm them. It is up to the rest of us to promote the public interest by fostering competition across the board and to recognize that being pro-free enterprise may sometimes require that we be anti-existing business.: Milton Friedman

Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.: G.K. Chesterton, G.K.'s Weekly, 4/10/26
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.: G.K. Chesterton, Everlasting Man, 1925
All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.: G.K. Chesterton, "On Gargoyles." Alarms and Discursions
Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.: G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw In America, 1922
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 5/5/28
A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed...: G.K. Chesterton
By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.: G.K. Chesterton, "On Detective Novels," Generally Speaking
By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 3/25/11
Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.: G.K. Chesterton, Commonwealth, 1933
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 4/19/30
From time to time, as we all know, a sect appears in our midst announcing that the world will very soon come to an end. Generally, by some slight confusion or miscalculation, it is the sect that comes to an end.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 9/24/27
* "How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.: G.K. Chesterton, The Listener. 3-6-35
I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 10/7/16
I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN 6-3-22
I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel.: G.K. Chesterton, The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, Act III
In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.: G.K. Chesterton, The Speaker 2-2-01
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN 8/4/06
It is terrible to contemplete how few politicians are hanged.: G.K. Chesterton, The Cleveland Press, 3/1/21
* "It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.: G.K. Chesterton, The Coloured Lands
Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all.: G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905
Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.: G.K. Chesterton, "Wine when it is red" All Things Considered
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 10/23/09
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.: G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World, 1910
most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.: G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England. 156
My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.: G.K. Chesterton, New York Times Magazine, 2/11/23
[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.: G.K. Chesterton, The Debate with Bertrand Russell, BBC Magazine, 11/27/35
Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.: G.K. Chesterton, Christendom in Dublin, 1933
Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN 9-11-09
Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.: G.K. Chesterton, Chapter 2, Heretics, 1905
Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.: G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908
Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home.: G.K. Chesterton, Chesterton Review, August, 1993
Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 6/23/28
Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.: G.K. Chesterton, "Charles II" Twelve Types
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.: G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, 1937
Some people leave money for the improvement of public buildings. I can leave dynamite for the improvement of public buildings.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN 3-17-06
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.: G.K. Chesterton, A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901
The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.: G.K. Chesterton, Daily News.4-22-05
The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.: G.K. Chesterton, Chapter 16, Heretics, 1905
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 7/16/10
The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN 1/9/09
The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 5/29/26
* "The only defensible war is a war of defense.: G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, 1937
The past is not what it was.: G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 9/7/29
The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN 10-28-22
The simplification of anything is always sensational.: G.K. Chesterton, Varied Types
* "The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 1/14/11
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 4/19/24
The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.: G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 6/11/10
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.: G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England, Ch.10
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.: G.K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity, 1921
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.: G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908
What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.: G.K. Chesterton, Daily News12-21-05
When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.: G.K. Chesterton, Chesterton Review, February, 1984
When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.: G.K. Chesterton, Daily News, 7/29/05
You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.: G.K. Chesterton, "How I Met the President" Tremendous Trifles

There is something adolescent about the defiantly bad-mannered intellectual self-sufficiency of [Ayn] Rand's heroes.: Brian Micklethwait
Does the consent principle also justify drug taking, bare-knuckle boxing, prostitution, polygamy, lowering the school leaving age to zero, euthanasia, gay marriage? They would argue that it does; people who take the consent principle as seriously as this are called libertarians.: Brian Micklethwait
People who are nice, and who don't like the idea of making other people miserable, restrain themselves from getting rich and happy. We see that syndrome all around us, and especially at political demonstrations of the concerned variety.: Brian Micklethwait
These two characteristic social types, the self-sacrificing conscience-ridden misery and the selfish capitalist bastard, dance a sort of self-reinforcing dance with each other, each reacting in horror to the other's existence, but neither realising how much, intellectually speaking, they have in common. The unifying error is that in living your life you are condemned to choose between your own happiness and the happiness of others, between selfishness and altruism.: Brian Micklethwait

Never fight an inanimate object.: P.J. O'Rourke
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.: P.J. O'Rourke
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.: P.J. O'Rourke
With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of make-believe that's worse than regular life.: P.J. O'Rourke
Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.: P.J. O'Rourke
There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.: P.J. O'Rourke
Politics are a lousy way for a free man to get things done.: P.J. O'Rourke
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.: P.J. O'Rourke
After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.: P.J. O'Rourke
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.: P.J. O'Rourke
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.: P.J. O'Rourke
Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.: P.J. O'Rourke
Maybe Hong Kong just was not one of those vital, strategic places worth fighting for-like the Falklands.: P.J. O'Rourke, on why Britain gave up Hong Kong
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.: P.J. O'Rourke

("toleration" exists to the degree of libertarian contamination of statism): New Libertarian Manifesto, by Samuel Edward Konkin III
Every victim of statism has internalized the State to some degree.: New Libertarian Manifesto, by Samuel Edward Konkin III

The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise!: Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt) (1806-1856)
The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth's service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. "The truth" outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods; it is Deity itself.: Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt) (1806-1856)
Before what is sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my conscience.: Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt) (1806-1856)
The State calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.: Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt) (1806-1856)

I was pulled over for speeding today. The officer said, "Don't you know the speed limit is 55 miles an hour?" And I said, "Yes, but I wasn't going to be out that long.": Steven Wright
I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it scattered around the beaches of the world ... Perhaps you've seen it.: Steven Wright
When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, "Well, what do you need?": Steven Wright
Is it weird in here, or is it just me?: Steven Wright
When I was a baby, I kept a diary. Recently, I was rereading it. It said, "Day 1 - Still tired from the move. Day 2 - Everybody talks to me like I'm an idiot.": Steven Wright
My school colors were clear. We used to say, "I'm not naked, I'm in the band.": Steven Wright
I can levitate birds. No one cares.: Steven Wright
In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.: Steven Wright
I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place.: Steven Wright
Last week, I went to a furniture store to look for a decaffeinated coffee table. They couldn't help me.: Steven Wright
What's another word for "thesaurus"?: Steven Wright
When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask if I'm leaving.: Steven Wright
When I was a kid, we had a quicksand box in the backyard. I was an only child . . . eventually.: Steven Wright
For my birthday I got a humidifier and a dehumidifier. I put them in the same room and let them fight it out.: Steven Wright
I replaced the headlights on my car with strobe lights. Now it looks like I'm the only one moving.: Steven Wright
I wrote a song, but I can't read music. Every time I hear a new song on the radio, I think "Hey, maybe I wrote that.": Steven Wright
I went to a general store, but they wouldn't let me buy anything specific.: Steven Wright
I spilled Spot remover on my dog. Now he's gone.: Steven Wright
My neighbor has a circular driveway. He can't get out.: Steven Wright
I put instant coffee in a microwave and almost went back in time.: Steven Wright
I have an answering machine for my car phone. It says, "I'm home now, but leave a message and I'll call when I'm out.": Steven Wright
I bought a house on a one-way dead-end road. I don't know how I got there.: Steven Wright
I have a hobby. I have the world's largest collection of sea shells. I keep it scattered on beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen some of it.: Steven Wright
I Xeroxed a mirror. Now I have an extra Xerox machine.: Steven Wright
Last week I forgot how to ride a bicycle.: Steven Wright
Hermits have no peer pressure.: Steven Wright
Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.: Steven Wright
There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.: Steven Wright
How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn't live there?: Steven Wright
I just got skylights put in my place. The people who live above me are furious.: Steven Wright
Imagine if birds were tickled by feathers.: Steven Wright
I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing "Happy Birthday".: Steven Wright
I accidentally installed the deer whistles on my car backwards. Now everywhere I go, I'm chased by a herd of deer.: Steven Wright
I got stopped by a cop the other day. He said, "Why'd you run that stop sign?" I said, "Because I don't believe everything I read.": Steven Wright
It doesn't matter what temperature a room is, it's always room temperature.: Steven Wright
Yesterday, my eyeglass prescription ran out.: Steven Wright
I'm a peripheral visionary.: Steven Wright
I make my own water - two glasses of H, one glass of O.: Steven Wright
Ballerinas are always on their toes. Why don't they just get taller ballerinas?: Steven Wright

Subjective value is not measured, but graded.: Ludwig von Mises
A stock market is crucial to the existence of capitalism and private property. For it means that there is a functioning market in the exchange of private titles to the means of production. There can be no genuine private ownership of capital without a stock market: there can be no true socialism if such a market is allowed to exist.: Ludwig von Mises
(as reported by Murray Rothbard)
Interventionism is not a golden mean between capitalism and socialism. It is the design of a third system of society's economic organization and must be appreciated as such.: Ludwig von Mises, Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism
It is noteworthy to remember that British socialism was not an achievement of Mr. Attlee's Labor Government, but of the war cabinet of Mr. Winston Churchill. What the Labor Party did was not the establishment of socialism in a free country, but retaining socialism as it had developed during the war and in the post-war period.: Ludwig von Mises, Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism
The recurrence of periods of depression and mass unemployment has discredited capitalism in the opinion of injudicious people. Yet these events are not the outcome of the operation of the free market. They are on the contrary the result of well-intentioned but ill-advised government interference with the market.: Ludwig von Mises, Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism
There are no means by which the height of wage rates and the general standard of living can be raised other than by accelerating the increase of capital as compared with population.: Ludwig von Mises, Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism
There are only middle-of-the-roaders who think they have been successful when they have delayed for some time an especially ruinous measure. They are always in retreat. They put up today with measures which only ten or twenty years ago they would have considered as undiscussable. They will in a few years acquiesce in other measures which they today consider as simply out of the question.: Ludwig von Mises, Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism
What can prevent the coming of totalitarian socialism is only a thorough change in ideologies. What we need is neither anti-socialism nor anti-communism but an open positive endorsement of that system to which we owe all the wealth that distinguishes our age from the comparatively straitened conditions of ages gone by.: Ludwig von Mises, Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism
First, I employ the term "liberal" in the sense attached to it every-where in the nineteenth century and still today in the countries of continental Europe. This usage is imperative because there is simply no other term available to signify the great political and intellectual movement that substituted free enterprise and the market economy for the precapitalistic methods of production; constitutional representative government for the absolutism of kings or oligarchies; and freedom of all individuals for slavery, serfdom, and other forms of bondage.: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
The technology of Soviet Russia utilizes without scruple all the results of bourgeois physics, chemistry, [p. 6] and biology just as if they were valid for all classes. The Nazi engineers and physicians did not disdain to utilize the theories, discoveries, and inventions of people of "inferior" races and nations.: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
[T]o live implies both imperfection and change.: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
What is wrong with our age is precisely the widespread ignorance of the role which these policies of economic freedom played in the technological evolution of the last two hundred years. People fell prey to the fallacy that the improvement of the methods of production was contemporaneous with the policy of laissez faire only by accident.: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
What is called "orthodox" economics is in most countries barred from the universities and is virtually unknown to the leading statesmen, politicians, and writers. The blame for the unsatisfactory state of economic affairs can certainly not be placed upon a science which both rulers and masses despise and ignore.: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends.: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
He who acts under an emotional impulse also acts. What distinguishes an emotional action from other actions is the valuation of input and output. Emotions disarrange valuations. Inflamed with passion, man sees the goal as more desirable and the price he has to pay for it as less burdensome than he would in cool deliberation.: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
If the governments had never interfered for the benefit of special banks, if they had never released some banks from the obligation, incumbent upon all individuals and firms in the market economy, to settle their liabilities in full compliance with the terms of the contract, no bank problem would have come into being.: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
The first aim of monetary policy must be to prevent governments from embarking on inflation and from creating conditions which encourage credit expansion on the part of banks.: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p. 224
The establishment of free banking was never seriously considered because it would have been too efficient in restricting credit expansion.: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p. 441
Sound money still means today what it meant in the nineteenth century: the gold standard. The eminence of the gold standard consists in the fact that it makes the determination of the monetary unit's purchasing power independent of the measures of governments. ... It makes it impossible for them to inflate. This is why the gold standard is furiously attacked by all those who expect that they will be benefited by bounties from the seemingly inexhaustible government purse.: Ludwig von Mises, "The Return to Sound Money"
No backdoor must be left open where inflation can slip in. No emergency can justify a return to inflation. Inflation can provide neither the weapons a nation needs to defend its independence nor the capital goods required for any project. It does not cure unsatisfactory conditions. It merely helps the rulers whose policies brought about the catastrophe to exculpate themselves.: Ludwig von Mises, "The Return to Sound Money"
The gold standard did not collapse. The governments destroyed it.: Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government, p. 251
The rich, the owners of the already operating plants, have no particular class interest in the maintenance of free competition.... their vested interests are rather in favor of measures preventing newcomers from challenging their position.: Ludwig von Mises
Mises called static classes that labor under legal disabilities âcastes.â Castes are created when legal barriers are raised to cement people into a class and prevent social mobility. ... In essence, castes are legislated classes that create a static society.: Wendy McElroy, Ludwig von Mises's Legacy for Feminists"
Mises's theory of how society functions is based on classical liberal thought, which considers cooperation to occur only when both sides benefit from the exchange. Indeed, the very perception of benefit is what impels each side to act. Even the infamous hostility between workers and capitalists dissolves in a situation of equal individual rights because each group has no ability to coerce cooperation from the other. Only when force is introduced into the exchange do group conflicts necessarily arise.: Wendy McElroy, Ludwig von Mises's Legacy for Feminists"
It is noteworthy to remember that British socialism was not an achievement of Mr. Attlee's Labor Government, but of the war cabinet of Mr. Winston Churchill.: Ludwig von Mises, "Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism"
War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.: Ludwig von Mises
To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.: Ludwig von Mises
Among those who make pretense to the appellation of educated men there is much hypocrisy. They put on an air of connoisseurship and feign enthusiasm for the art of the past and artists passed away long ago. They show no similar sympathy for the contemporary artist who still fights for recognition. Dissembled adoration for the Old Masters is with them a means to disparage and ridicule the new ones who deviate from traditional canons and create their own.: Ludwig von Mises
Imitation of masterworks of the past is not art; it is routine.: Ludwig von Mises
Committees and councils are not likely to adopt the ideas of bold pioneers. They prefer to range themelves on the safe side.: Ludwig von Mises
Only romantic prepossession can induce an observer to ignore the fact that more and more citizens of the capitalistic countries live in an environment which cannot be simply dismissed as ugly: Ludwig von Mises
The dull hosts of the "intellectuals" will not abandon their superstitious belief in the superiority of socialism. Superstitions die hard.: Ludwig von Mises
[A]s soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual's mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail. The personal freedom of the individual is abrogated.: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
Capitalism deproletarianizes the "common man" and elevates him to the rank of a "bourgeois.": Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
On the market of a capitalistic society the common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Those shops and plants which cater exclusively or predominantly to the wealthier citizens' demand for refined luxuries play merely a subordinate role in the economic setting of the market economy. They never attain the size of big business. Big business always serves -- directly or indirectly -- the masses.: Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini constantly proclaim that they are chosen by destiny to bring salvation to this world. They claim they are the leaders of the creative youth who fight against their outlived elders. They bring from the East the new culture which is to replace the dying Western civilization. They want to give the coup de grace to liberalism and capitalism; they want to overcome immoral egoism by altruism; they plan to replace the anarchic democracy by order and organization, the society of "classes" by the total state, the market economy by socialism. Their war is not a war for territorial expansion, for loot and hegemony like the imperialistic wars of the past, but a holy crusade for a better world to live in. And they feel certain of their victory because they are convinced that they are borne by "the wave of the futuree": Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis, 1940
Nothing is today more fashionable than slandering Western civilization.: Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis, 1940
The "progressives" who today masquerade as "liberals" may rant against "fascism"; yet it is their policy that paves the way for Hitlerism.: Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis, 1940
Unless we are utterly oblivious to the facts, we must realize that the German workers are the most reliable supporters of the Hitler regime. Nazism has won them over completely by eliminating unemployment and by reducing the entrepreneurs to the status of shop managers (Betriebsfuhrer). Big business, shopkeepers, and peasants are disappointed. Labor is well satisfied and will stand by Hitler, unless the war takes a turn which would destroy their hope for a better life after the peace treaty. Only military reverses can deprive Hitler of the backing of the German workers.: Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis, 1940
The fact that the capitalists and entrepreneurs, faced with the alternative of Communism or Nazism, chose the latter, does not require any further explanation. They preferred to live as shop managers under Hitler than to be "liquidated" as "bourgeois" by Stalin. Capitalists don't like to be killed any more than other people do.: Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis, 1940
The workers in the Anglo-Saxon countries, too, knew that the socialist parties competing for their favor usually accused each other of favoring capitalism. Communists of all shades advance this accusation against socialists. And within the Communist groups the Trotskyites used this same argument against Stalin and his men. And vice versa. The fact that the "progressives" bring the same accusation against Nazism and Fascism will not prevent labor some day from following another gang wearing shirts of a different color.: Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis, 1940
Not everything that exists today is reasonable; but this does not mean that everything that does not exist is sensible.: Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis, 1940
The usual terminology of political language is stupid. What is "left" and what is "right"? Why should Hitler be "right" and Stalin, his temporary friend, be "left"? Who is "reactionary" and who is "progressive"? Reaction against an unwise policy is not to be condemned. And progress towards chaos is not to be commended.: Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis, 1940
Reaction against an unwise policy is not to be condemned. And progress towards chaos is not to be commended.: Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis, 1940
What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.: Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis, 1940
A citizen who casts his ballot without having to the best of his abilities studied as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties.: Ludwig von Mises, in The Freeman, August 1959.
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.: Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy, page 77.
Decentralization on a federal basis gives in itself no guarantee that freedom will be preserved. Medieval feudalism had both decentralization and federalism; but only the lords were free (and tax-exempt); burghers and peasants had to endure legal disabilities, had no share in the government and had alone to pay taxes.: Ludwig von Mises
I completely agree with your rejection of conservatism. In his book Up from Liberalism, Buckley -- as a person a fine and educated man -- has clearly defined his standpoint: "Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgment that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before." (p. 154) Origines, Augustinus, and Thomas Aquinas have said the same thing in other words. It is a sad truth that this program is more attractive than everything that has been said about liberty and about the idealistic and materialistic benefits of the free economy.: Ludwig von Mises, in a letter to F.A. Hayek
No political or economic program, no matter how absurd, can, in the eyes of its supporters, be contradicted by experience.: Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics
Every theoretical argument that is supposedly drawn from history necessarily becomes a logical argument about pure theory apart from all history.: Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics
The worst and most dangerous form of absolutist rule is that of an intolerant majority.: Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History
From the very beginnings of the socialist movement and the endeavors to revive the interventionist policies of the precapitalistic ages, both socialism and interventionism were utterly discredited in the eyes of those conversant with economic theory. But the ideas of the immense majority of ignorant people [are] exclusively driven by the most powerful human passions of envy and hatred. [...] They are socialists because they are blinded by envy and ignorance. They stubbornly refuse to study economics and spurn the economists' devastating critique of the socialist plans because, in their eyes, economics, being an abstract theory, is simply nonsense. They pretend to trust only in experience. But they no less stubbornly refuse to take cognizance of the undeniable facts of experience[...].: Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
To the parties of special interests, all political questions appear exclusively as problems of political tactics. Their ultimate goal is fixed for them from the start. Their aim is to obtain, at the cost of the rest of the population, the greatest possible advantages and privileges for the groups they represent. The party platform is intended to disguise this objective and give it a certain appearance of justification, but under no circumstances to announce it publicly as the goal of party policy. The members of the party, in any case, know what their goal is; they do not need to have it explained to them. How much of it ought to be imparted to the world is, however, a purely tactical question.: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
All antiliberal parties want nothing but to secure special favors for their own members, in complete disregard of the resulting disintegration of the whole structure of society. They cannot withstand for a moment the criticism that liberalism makes of their aims.: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
Liberalism does not have the least thing in common with any of these parties. It stands at the very opposite pole from all of them. It promises special favors to no one.: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
Thus, it is easily seen that liberalism cannot be put into the same class with the parties of special interests without denying its very nature. It is something radically different from them all. They are out for battle and extol violence; liberalism, on the contrary, desires peace and the ascendancy of ideas. It is for this reason that all parties, however badly disunited they may otherwise be, form a united front against liberalism.: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
The enemies of liberalism have branded it as the party of the special interests of the capitalists. This is characteristic of their mentality. They simply cannot understand a political ideology as anything but the advocacy of certain special privileges opposed to the general welfare.: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
Of all accusations against the system of Free Trade and Private Property, none is more foolish than the statement that it is anti-social and individualistic and that it atomizes the body social. Trade does not disintegrate, as romantic enthusiasts for the autarky of small portions of the earth's surface assert; it unites. The division of labor is what first makes social ties: it is the social element pure and simple. Whoever advocates the economic self-sufficiency of nations and states, seeks to disintegrate the ecumenical society; whoever seeks to destroy the social division of labor within a nation by means of class war is anti-social.: Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, ch 18: "Society"
The owner takes nothing away from anyone. No one can say that he goes short because of another's abundance. It is flattering the envious instincts of the masses to give them a calculation of how much more the poor man would have to dispose of, if property were equally distributed. What is overlooked is the fact that the volume of production and of the social income are not fixed and unchangeable but depend essentially upon the distribution of property.: Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, ch 18: "Society"
The inferiority of many self-styled intellectuals manifests itself precisely in the fact that they fail to recognize what capacity and reasoning power are required to operate successfully a business enterprise.: Ludwig von Mises, "Anticommunism" versus Capitalism
People are anxious to endorse the tenets they consider as fashionable lest they appear boorish and backward.: Ludwig von Mises, "Anticommunism" versus Capitalism
In the eyes of the interventionists the mere existence of profits is objectionable. They speak of profit without dealing with its corollary, loss. They do not comprehend that profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all entrepreneurial activities. It is profit and loss that make the consumers supreme in the direction of business. It is absurd to contrast production for profit and production for use. On the unhampered market a man can earn profits only by supplying the consumers in the best and cheapest way with the goods they want to use. Profit and loss withdraw the material factors of production from the hands of the inefficient and place them in the hands of the more efficient. It is their social function to make a man the more influential in the conduct of business the better he succeeds in producing commodities for which people scramble.: Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos
All those evils which the self-styled "progressives" interpret as evidence of the failure of capitalism are the outcome of their allegedly beneficial interference with the market. Only the ignorant, wrongly identifying interventionism and capitalism, believe that the remedy for these evils is socialism.: Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos

We need laissez-faire, not because it creates the best of all possible worlds but because anything you do in the attempt to improve on it will make matters worse.: Sudha Shenoy (PDF)
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
Prices aren't just made up.: Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"
Prices are signals. They communicate vital information about the state of resources, goods, and services. Changes in those signals indicate changes in prevailing conditions -- and stimulate remedial action: conservation by consumers and new supplies and alternative products from entrepreneurs. The idea that anything good can come from distorting or squelching those signals is astounding in its lack of wisdom. It's equivalent to believing that a person with a fever can be helped by placing his thermometer in ice water.: Sheldon Richman, Canute's Courtiers Were Wrong
A regulation is essentially a tax on nonmonetary wealth such as time, liberty, energy, and property.: James Ostrowski
Harvard economist W. Kip Viscusi has shown that federal safety-cap regulations have had no effect on the rate of poisoning deaths among children: Since caps are labeled "childproof," parents are apparently less careful about keeping the medicine out of children's reach. So, some greater number of children find those more-available bottles, pry them open, and take the drugs -- thereby offsetting any gains from the regulation.: Jonathan Tranger,
"The economic and social benefits of a less-regulated United States"
Did you know that the administration of George Bush the First endorsed more costly regulatory legislation than had any other administration since Richard Nixon -- also a Republican? Let no one say that the GOP is the enemy of the regulated society.: Jonathan Tranger,
"The economic and social benefits of a less-regulated United States"
During the French Revolution hundreds of businessmen died on the guillotine because they had dared to calculate prices in gold or ask for gold.: Hans F. Sennholz
The principle of voluntarism should not be excluded, a priori, from the realm of monetary policy.: Gary North
Legal fictions are far more difficult to impose on men if the absurdity of that fiction is exposed, hour by hour, by an autonomous free market mechanism.: Gary North
Prices are the free market's greatest achievement in reducing the irrationality of human affairs.: Gary North
Every price reflects the composite of all predictors' expectations.: Gary North
What we find in the price-fixing of currencies is exactly what we find in the price-fixing of all other commodities: Periods of inflexible, politically imposed "stability" interspersed with great economic discontinuities.: Gary North
For those who prefer tidal waves to the splashing of the surf, for those who prefer earthquakes to slowly shifting earth movements, the rationale of the political monopoly of money may appear sane. It is strange that anyone else believes in it.: Gary North
The defense of the free market must be in terms of its capacity to expand the range of choices open to freemen. It is an ethical defense.: Gary North
Now you can see why a parrot could be a passably good economist. Simply teach it to answer "supply and demand" to every question!: Professor Henry Spearman
Harvard Professor of Economics & Amateur Detective
Murder at the Margin
The Cold War "iron curtain" between East and West has been replaced with a customs curtain between North and South.: Johan Norberg
Government failure, yes, but private defense? Before you say this is an outlandish idea, remember that just about everything else done in the private sector sounds, at some level, implausible. What if I told you that oil needs to be extracted from the bottom of the ocean, converted and refined into gasoline, and then made available to every American not far from his house, on demand and at the price of bottled water?: Lew Rockwell
They get nothing for something, which is always the small-print inscription on the other side of something for nothing.: Gary North, THE GOLD WARS, Issue #7
The West has bet its future on fractional reserve banking. This is additional evidence that the West is doomed.: Gary North, THE GOLD WARS, Issue #7
The reason grocery stores sell soup is because this is a cheaper and a better way of getting soup than any other way that is known. Let the individual conclude that the price of soup in cans is too costly or the final product is inferior to home-made soup and he will obtain his own ingredients through his own efforts. Then he will make his own soup.: Robert LeFevre, Capitalism
... if you begin inhibiting productive people, there will be less total production. If at the same time, you turn around and take persons who may not be productive, in spite of their wishes to be ... you take the existing amount of wealth and you place it out at a level where it can be consumed more rapidly That does not solve poverty. That increases poverty and spreads it out farther. And that is precisely what we have been doing in this country thanks to government interference.: Robert LeFevre
The government has spent a hundred billion dollars in ... trying to solve the poverty problem through the program of redistributing the wealth and all it has accomplished is that it has redistributed the poverty!: Robert LeFevre
... redistributing does not solve a problem: it merely redistributes the problem!: Robert LeFevre
If you're going to solve the problem, you're going to have to do it another way, and the only way to do it is, I believe, the libertarian approach to help the poor, and what is that? You stop inhibiting them! Open the doors and let them produce. They want to. They are good producers.: Robert LeFevre
What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.: Henry George
Empires are noted for military strength at the beginning and fiscal weakness at the end.: Gary North
It will not be enemies at the gates who overwhelm the American empire. It will be the army of politically armed economic dependents inside the gates.: Gary North
When something cannot go on, it has a tendency to stop.: Herb Stein, chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers
The war against economic freedom always begins with the state's assertion of sovereignty over money.: Gary North
Expenditures rise to meet income.: Parkinson's Law
Price controls will make things worse. Believe me, I've been there ... Controls have not worked in 40 centuries. They will not work now.: C. Jackson Grayson, who headed Nixon's price-wage control experiment from 1971 to 1973
One of the last refuges of someone whose pet project or theory has been exposed as economic nonsense is to say: "Economics is all very well, but there are also non-economic values to consider." Presumably, these are supposed to be higher and nobler concerns that soar above the level of crass materialism. Of course there are non-economic values. In fact, there are only non-economic values.... Economics does not say you should make the most money possible.... What lofty talk about "non-economic values" usually boils down to is that some people do not want their own particular values weighed against anything.: Thomas Sowell
What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and the capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.: Thomas Sowell
It would be silly for me to contend that only professional economists should comment upon economics: I am not a professional economist myself, and I'll spout off on the subject at the drop of a hat.: Gene Callahan
An increased supply of goods produced will raise the demand for money and also therefore lower the overall level of prices.: Murray N. Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking
Take the Christmas tree. Once a man would locate a nice spruce in the forest, chop it down, drag it home, and his family would festoon it with homemade ornaments. Total effort: about a day's worth. Today's urban paterfamilias buys a spruce someone else chopped down for his family to festoon with commercial ornaments. Suppose he earns $50,000 per year. A nice spruce costs about $50 and some new ornaments perhaps $100. That $150 is about one day's income, representing a day's effort. Each man has, directly or indirectly, exchanged his labor for a decorated tree. Who is to say which is more spiritual?: Michael Levin, Christmas Movies and Bad Economics
The principle that both sides benefit from trade is readily visible when it involves two parties within a country; it somehow becomes confused when an invisible political barrier separates the parties. Neither the mercantilists of yesteryear nor those who fuss about the trade deficit today have ever satisfactorily answered this fundamental question: Since each and every trade is "favorable" to the individual traders, how is it possible that these transactions can be totaled up to produce something "unfavorable"?: Lawrence W. Reed, "The Trade Deficit: Much Ado About Nothing"
Urban philharmonic orchestras are not now, nor have the ever been, supported by the fans of classical music. They have been supported by the political victims of the fans of classical music.: Gary North
While "poor" Americans don't live in opulence, they are surely not poor either by international or historical standards in our own country. I'm betting if God condemned an unborn spirit to a lifetime of poverty but He left him free to choose the country in which to be poor, he'd choose United States.: Walter E. Williams, "A Nation of 'Hamburger Flippers'?"
How many times have we heard that the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer? Contrary to that nonsense, the fact of the matter is that some of the rich are getting poorer, and many of the poorer are getting richer.: Walter E. Williams, "A Nation of 'Hamburger Flippers'?"
There're a lot of things we can disagree about, but let's have straight thinking as a part of the process.: Walter E. Williams, "Economic Straight Thinking"
I think some of the ignorance and much of the demagoguery stems from the usage of the phrase "income distribution". It might make some people think income is distributed; in other words there's a dealer of dollars. The reason that some people have few dollars while others have millions upon millions is that the dollar dealer is unjust. An alternative vision might be that there's a pile of money intended for all of us. The reason why some are rich and some are poor is that the greedy rich got to the pile first and took their unfair share. Clearly, in either case, justice would require a re-dealing, or redistribution, of the dollars where the government takes ill-gotten gains of the few and returns them to their rightful owners.: Walter E. Williams, "From Whence Comes Income?"
Sure we'd be paying lower prices but the selling price of a good is just one element of its cost. The full cost of a good includes all additional resources expended for its acquisition. These additional resources might include time and travel that are by no means free.: Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"
When a good becomes scarce, there are several socially optimal responses: consumers should economize on its usage and search for cheaper substitutes. Producers should increase production of the good and search for substitutes. Rising prices provide both consumers and producers with incentives to behave in socially optimal ways. Plus, they do so voluntarily.: Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"
Prices aren't just made up. Prices are important market signals reflecting the relative scarcity conditions of any good. Rising prices imply an increase in the scarcity, or expected scarcity, of a good. In other words, if a good becomes scarcer or is expected to become scarcer, it's price will rise. The opposite is true when a good becomes abundant or is expected to become abundant.: Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"
Markets are not perfect. After all markets consist of millions upon millions of imperfect independent decision-makers like you and me. Abundant evidence, not faith, demonstrates that markets are far more reliable and predictable than a bunch of arrogant politicians and bureaucrats.: Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"
When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like "low unemployment causes inflation" that never quite stood up to reality. But the micro stuff was both cool and useful. It was full of interesting concepts about the relationships between supply and demand that really did work.: Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V
All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease. Let me repeat that because you might have dozed off, and it's important. Demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease. For example, if flights to Miami become cheaper, demand for hotel rooms in Miami goes up -- because more people are flying to Miami and need a room.: Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V
At this point, it's pretty common for people to try to confuse things by saying, "aha! But Linux is FREE!" OK. First of all, when an economist considers price, they consider the total price, including some intangible things like the time it takes to set up, reeducate everyone, and convert existing processes. All the things that we like to call "total cost of ownership." Secondly, by using the free-as-in-beer argument, these advocates try to believe that they are not subject to the rules of economics because they've got a nice zero they can multiply everything by.: Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V
To summarize, I'm not very impressed by people who try to prove wild economic things about free-as-in-beer software, because they're just getting divide-by-zero errors as far as I'm concerned.: Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V
Once again: demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company's strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the "commodity price" -- the price that arises when you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods. So: Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements. If you can do this, demand for your product will increase and you will be able to charge more and make more.: Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V
The low prices, of course, increase demand. Increased demand for PCs meant increased demand for their complement, MS-DOS. All else being equal, the greater the demand for a product, the more money it makes for you. And that's why Bill Gates can buy Sweden and you can't.: Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V
The American economy is the eighth wonder of the world; the ninth is the economic ignorance of the American people.: Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange
Economic ignorance is the breeding ground of totalitarianism.: John Jewkes, British Economist
Sound economics, stripped of ideological bias, teaches us that everything of value has a cost that somebody must pay. It informs us that a higher standard of living, if it is not to come at someone's expense, can only come about through greater production. It tells us that nations become wealthy not by printing money or spending it, but through capital accumulation and the creation of goods and services.: How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
The historical evidence suggests that in truly free markets, monopolies are difficult to start, harder to maintain, and tend to wither away over time.: How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
Another textbook author confirmed the notion that at least some publishers strongly shape the contents of the text to appeal to teacher unions. "The road to the free market sometimes requires little steps," he said, "particularly when your audience consists of teachers paid by the state.": How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
In economics, there are many settled propositions. Some examples: people seek maximum value for minimum cost; people differ in their evaluations of the same product, service or other good; changes in prices lead to changes in consumer and producer behavior; scarce goods must somehow be rationed. There are many others. A good economics text will show the student how to apply these propositions -- the laws of economics -- to any issue or controversy.: How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
We live in a world of scarcity. There isn't enough of most things to allow people to have as much as they want. This fact is economic bedrock. From it follows the necessity of making choices in order to obtain the most satisfaction possible from our limited resources. Economics is the study of the trade-offs human beings make when they choose among scarce goods.: How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
Another pitfall to avoid is reinforcing the common notion that monopolies are easy to create and maintain in a market with open entry. What history actually shows is that it is risky and costly to try to monopolize a market with unrestricted entry. This is why those who want to collude tend to use politics to stifle competition. The key to long-lasting monopoly has always been protective government action.: How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
The student should understand that laws and regulations aimed at protecting competition can be used to protect competitors against competition.: How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
The student needs to understand that the laws of economics remain in play no matter what the intentions of planning advocates may be, and usually deliver results very different from those desired.: How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
Public Goods. A public good is a product that, when it is produced, gives automatic benefits to many. National defense and interstate highways, for example, are usually considered public goods. Once they are in place, everyone can benefit from them whether or not they paid for them. But a textbook should not make the error of assuming that everything the government provides is a public good.: How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
Externalities. The market does not function well when the actions of one person or group negatively impact others, particularly where unwanted or undeserved costs are incurred -- pollution is one example. A text should explore the advantages and disadvantages of different options for dealing with externalities.: How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
Economic Stability. The economy will not maximize prosperity if it suffers from inflation, high unemployment, or both. Whether economic instability is an inherent feature of a market economy, or is induced by government policy, is a question on which there is much expert disagreement; at the least, the student should be made aware of the debate. From there, the text should discuss the kinds of government policies contending experts recommend.: How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
Regulation. The question of whether government regulation benefits or harms the welfare of citizens is an important subject for any economics textbook. The pitfall to avoid is assuming that regulations yield results that are in line with the intentions of their framers, or are necessarily