Will Durant Quotes

Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Libertarians are my most intense enemies

A libertarian is someone who can believe that the police are no more than a gang of thugs without realizing that in the absence of police, thugs will gather into gangs.

There is a reason for the affected profession of " anarchist sympathies" among Tories and grandees, and of " libertarian principles" by Hobbesian yahoos of the right. Among the former, one sees the upholding of the view that a gentleman's business and property are his own, and none of the government's. Among the latter, a distaste for democracy, for taxation, and for the need to consult others about the planet.

These things I believe: that government should butt out.

My parents both defected from communist Hungary and were what most people would today call libertarian. I grew up with a general distaste for taxation and any policy that intruded on our lives.

People are probably going to realize they can live with a lot less government than what they thought they needed.

I'm a libertarian. It's a terrible word.

The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

No American conservative has ever argued that the government should never be involved in peoples' lives. That is anarchy, and we don't argue for that.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

America is the most individualist, libertarian culture in the world.

You came out of your mother’s belly without government. You have lived so far without the help of government …. How many people in this world live without government, yet do well enough, and are well looked upon?

I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will not rule, and also ruled I will not be!

The liberal, emphasizing the civil and property rights of the individual, insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the state his servant.

Individual liberty, freed from all bonds and all laws, all objective and social values, is in reality only a death-dealing anarchy.

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.

The individual is greater than the state.

The Anarchists believe in the State; only they insist that the greater part, if not all, of the necessity for its existence is the result of an artificial limitation of the freedom of civil society, and that the completion of industrial freedom may one day so harmonize individuals that it will no longer be necessary to provide a guarantee of political freedom.

Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.

Arguably, the application of complete libertarianism leads one towards anarchy.

I am a strong believer in small government that doesn't interfere in people's lives.

Government has gotten too big, and it's infringed on our liberty and freedom.

Libertarians secretly worried that ultimately someone will figure out the whole of their political philosophy boils down to “Get Off My Property.” News flash: This is not really a big secret to the rest of us.