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1 " Moreover, in the system of criminal punishment in the libertarian world, the emphasis would never be, as it is now, on " society's" jailing the criminal; the emphasis would necessarily be on compelling the criminal to make restitution to the victim of his crime. The present system, in which the victim is not recompensed but instead has to pay taxes to support the incarceration of his own attacker — would be evident nonsense in a world that focuses on the defense of property rights and therefore on the victim of crime. "
2 " I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live. "
― Clint Eastwood
3 " In a covenant...among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society. "
― Hans-Hermann Hoppe
4 " Before the mid-20th century, when American libertarians entangled themselves in conservative coalitions against the New Deal and Soviet Communism, " free market" thinkers largely saw themselves as liberals or radicals, not as conservatives. Libertarian writers, from Smith to Bastiat to Spencer, had little interest in tailoring their politics to conservative or " pro-business" measurements. They frequently identified capitalists, and their protectionist policies, as among the most dangerous enemies of free exchange and property rights. "
5 " The real Machiavellian genius of the First Amendment is that free speech turns out to be mostly harmless — a lot of P.C. nit-picking, dingbat conspiracy theories, tedious libertarian screeds and name calling. The only “free speech” that has any effect in a stable, well-run plutocracy is the kind protected by Buckley vs. Valeo in the form of campaign contributions. "
― Tim Kreider
6 " Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, “That would certainly make everything easier,” even though I can’t think of one person who’d qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson. "
― Chuck Klosterman , But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
7 " I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred. "
― A.E. Samaan
8 " Direct action meant that the goal of any and all of these activities was to provide ways for people to get in touch with their own powers and capacities, to take back the power of naming themselves and their lives. It was to be distinguished from more conventional political activity even in a democratic system. Instead of attempting to make change by forming interest groups to pressure politicians, anarchists insisted that we learn to think and act for ourselves by joining together in organizations in which our experience, our perception, and our activity can guide and make the change. Knowledge does not precede experience, it flows from it: " We begin by deciding to work, and through working, we learn ... We will learn how to live in libertarian communism by living in it." People learn how to be free only by exercising freedom: " We are not going to find ourselves ... with people ready-made for the future ... Without the continued exercise of their faculties, there will be no free people ... The external revolution and the internal revolution presuppose one another, and they must be simultaneous in order to be successful. "
9 " A libertarian is somebody who believes, of course, in personal liberty. And liberty is a personal thing; it is not collective. You don’t gain liberty because you belong to a group. So we don’t talk about women’s rights or gay rights or anything else. Everybody has an absolute equal right as an individual, and it comes to them naturally. "
― Ron Paul
10 " 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. "
11 " The libertarian philosophy doesn't explain the best way to grow a vegetable garden!" Why do some people talk as if there should be one concept or principle which is all you'll ever need to know in order to handle everything in life? Right now the PRIMARY threat to humanity--by a factor of a zillion--is the belief in " authority." And the solution--the ONLY solution--is for people to escape that superstition. Questions like, " But how do we care for the poor?" are 100% logically IRRELEVANT to proving that statism is immoral and destructive. " But gee, if I stop sawing off my toes with this steak knife, how will I balance my checkbook?" Why the hell do people imagine that anarchists have some obligation to explain how every aspect of everyone's life will work, just because they say, " Having a ruling class is immoral and irrational" ? When someone tells you to stop advocating evil crap (e.g., statism), they don't suddenly acquire an obligation to explain the whole universe to you, or to guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to anyone ever again. "
12 " Some that read this book will find its Libertarian and Constitutionalist slant a bit obtuse and maybe even off-putting. This author makes no apologies for viewing the history of the eugenics movement from this political perspective. It is the ethical and legal underpinnings of the American Revolution that remain as a guiding light while the eugenics movement continues to reemerge long after its alleged demise. Limited, or rather minimal government, goes a long way to curtail the disconnect that emerges when government grows so large that it no longer feels compelled to heed to the dictates of the governed. "
― A.E. Samaan , H.H. Laughlin: American Scientist, American Progressive, Nazi Collaborator (History of Eugenics, Vol. 2)
13 " A libertarian is someone who graduated from thinking that there are problems with the state to realizing that the state is the problem. "
14 " So what? Why should an a priori proof of the libertarian property theory make any difference? Why not engage in aggression anyway?” Why indeed?! But then, why should the proof that 1+1=2 make any difference? One certainly can still act on the belief that 1+1=3. The obvious answer is “because a propositional justification exists for doing one thing, but not for doing another.” But why should we be reasonable, is the next come-back. Again, the answer is obvious. For one, because it would be impossible to argue against it; and further, because the proponent raising this question would already affirm the use of reason in his act of questioning it. This still might not suffice and everyone knows that it would not, for even if the libertarian ethic and argumentative reasoning must be regarded as ultimately justified, this still does not preclude that people will act on the basis of unjustified beliefs either because they don’t know, they don’t care, or they prefer not to know. I fail to see why this should be surprising or make the proof somehow defective. "
― Hans-Hermann Hoppe , The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy
15 " People ask me what I am politically and I've previously offered this equation: I became a conservative by being around liberals. And I became a libertarian after being around conservatives. "
― Greg Gutfeld , The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage
16 " These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt’s Limits of State Action, Kant’s insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable. "
― Noam Chomsky
17 " I am an existential libertarian humanist cocksucker. Now, what else do you want to know? "
18 " The Libertarian Party convention wasn’t much better. You will never find a more stammering, awkward, inarticulate group of people than libertarians. I still remember the convention the previous year, entitled 'Women of Liberty.' All of the speakers were women, and all of the topics boiled down to 'Effectively Communicating Libertarian Ideas to Women' — in other words, 'How to talk to girls.' Looking around at the nearly entirely white male audience, it wasn’t hard to see why they chose this tack. "
― Phillip Andrew Bennett Low , Indecision Now! A Libertarian Rage
19 " Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition. "
― Pyotr Kropotkin
20 " The important question is, therefore, not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings organise their society. "
― Colin Ward , Anarchy in Action
