Murray Rothbard Quotes

You cannot parcel out freedom in pieces because freedom is all or nothing.

As I understand the American Founders, the most brilliant and daring idea they had was that it's possible to create a free society that could stay free forever.

The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and maxims of free society.

In a Constitution for a free people, there can be no doubt that the meaning of ‘liberty’ must be broad indeed.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

Free market never succeeded without free men and free society.

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

Self government is our right, a thing born to us at birth a thing no more to be doled out to us by another people then the right to life itself then the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers or to love our kind.

If freedom is to flourish the philosophic foundations of a free society must be kept a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of the liveliest minds.

The birthright of man ... is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact.

That Americans are entitled to freedom is incontestable on every rational principle. All men have one common original: they participate in one common nature, and consequently have one common right. No reason can be assigned why one man should exercise any power or preeminence over his fellow-creatures more than another; unless they have voluntarily vested him with it.

We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.

A piece of freedom is no longer enough for human beings...unlike bread, a slice of liberty does not finish hunger. Freedom is like life. It cannot be had in installments. Freedom is indivisible--we have it all, or we are not free.

The hardest lesson of my life has come to me late. It is that a nation can win freedom without its people becoming free.

Man is only truly free only among equally free men.

America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom - is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.

All men are born free: just not for long.

Our rights come from nature and God, not government.

I believe that God has endowed men with certain inalienable rights as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and that no legislature and no majority, however great, may morally limit or destroy these; that the sole function of government is to protect life, liberty, and property, and anything more than this is usurpation and oppression.

All men are, or ought to be free, possessing unalienable rights, and the high and noble qualifications of the laws of nature and of self-preservation, to think, and act, and say as they please, while they maintain a due respect to the rights and privileges of all other creatures, infringing upon none.

In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything

If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real world he must also have the right to sustain his life by grappling with and transforming resources; he must be able to own the ground and the resources on which he stands and which he must use. In short, to sustain his human right.