Murray Rothbard Quotes

Ultimately, there is no entity called 'government'; there are only people forming themselves into groups called 'governments' and acting in a 'governmental' manner.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.

A society is not a market. It is a political community.

Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.

… by consenting with others to make one body-politic under government, a man puts himself under an obligation to every one of that society to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it.

Governments should be smaller. In fact, governments and countries in general are less important than we think they are. They take credit for processes they have nothing to do with.

The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

We believe in the individual. Government protects our rights as individuals and our rights as property owners. We come together as a community to ensure our protections and to ensure our individuals' security. That's where government comes in and why we pay taxes.

Individual actions are important because in any democracy, citizens need to feel agency. If you feel powerless, totally powerless, it's psychologically dangerous.

One doesn't have to be an activist and start a movement.

The Constitution is worth saving, the rule of law is worth saving, democracy is worth saving, but these things can and will be lost if everyone waits around for someone else.

If every man could act as he chose, the whole of history would be a tissue of disconnected accidents.

The story of man is the history, first, of the acceptance and imposition of restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation of the individual within that system of necessary restraints.

Political rule is so natural and necessary to the human race that it cannot be withdrawn without destroying nature itself; for the nature of man is such that he is a social animal.

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

We are... living in a free society without the faith that built that society - and without the conviction and dedication needed to sustain it... We still have the cathedral of freedom but how long will it last without the faith?

Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature.

It is denied that any limit can be set to governmental activity.

People behave agentically, but they produce theories that afford people very little agency.

No man has the right to say to his country

I fail to understand why gethes (Humans), talk about individuals versus society. They are the same thing. The action of every individual counts, and those individual acts of personal responsibility accumulate to create society. Snowflakes are equally blind to their role in causing avalanches.

In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable

Government must not supersede the will of the people or the responsibilities of the people. The function of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.

And where else will [Hume,] this degenerate son of science, this traitor to his fellow men, find the origin of just powers, if not in the majority of the society? Will it be in the minority? Or in an individual of that minority?