Wilhelm von Humboldt Quotes

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.

In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government... the poorer and less free the people.

The idea that an overweening federal government is a threat to both freedom and equality (not to mention prosperity) goes back to Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry and some other fairly respectable personages. You can disagree with them, or with Coolidge or Reagan or Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or George Will, but to dismiss them as nothing more than mouthpieces of the wealthy and big business is to indulge in [a] sort of anti-intellectualism…

The conservative movement is about government playing its important yet limited role, and about not falling into the trap of believing that every problem has an exclusive government answer for it.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not pledge their fortunes and sacred honor so the federal government could play 'helicopter parent' to a free people. They saw government as our shared project to secure liberty, doing a few big things and doing them well.

I hate rules. I hate government intervention. Just live and let live, man.

I'm one of those guys who believes in next to zero government. They just screw everything up.

I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

Government should not tell you what to do unless there's a compelling public purpose.

It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.

Countries which enjoy the highest level of peace, happiness and prosperity are the ones where the law least interfered with private affairs.

I have no quarrel with libertarians who advance the concept of capitalism . I believe that people will decide for themselves what they want to do. The all-important thing is that they be free to make that decision and that they do not stand in the way of communities that wish to make other decisions.

Government should stay the hell out of people's business.

There is no virtue in denying the law of gravity, and there should be no virtue in denying the limitations of government. ... The more we glorify government, the more liberties we will lose.

There's a very healthy tradition in America of skepticism of centralized power. If we ever lose the skepticism of centralized power, we'll lose the essence of the country.

My whole take on libertarianism is simply that I don't know what's best for other people.

And since our country's founding, we've tried to keep government's heavy hand out of our personal lives, while ensuring that we do the most important thing, which is to protect those who cannot protect themselves.

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

The less government we have the better.

If government were less important in our lives, politicians would have fewer goodies to trade. In return, we'd have more money and more freedom.

Libertarians are believers in small government who really mean it -- no excuses, no exceptions. [For Libertarians], the excesses of government are their best recruiters.

Libertarianism is the enemy of all racism.

The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.