Libertarian Principles Quotes

I never thought I was a libertarian until I picked up Reason magazine and realized I agree with everything they had printed.

The Libertarian Party is a shameful party

In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves.

Libertarian principles are very simple, but you can't violate any of them and still call yourself Libertarian.

The true test of one's commitment to liberty and private property rights doesn't come when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we agree. The true test comes when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we disagree.

The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic.

He was a superb military officer but he was also an extraordinarily gifted politician. That he was an unusually open, honest and no-nonsense politician did not make him unsuited for the profession, only uncommon. In uniform and in politics Barry's purpose was always the defense of freedom. And nobody before or since managed the task more ably or more colorfully than Barry Goldwater.

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.

I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.

I am a libertarian with a small "l" and a Republican with a capital "R". And I am a Republican with a capital "R" on grounds of expediency, not on principle.

The Libertarians, of whom I'm rather fond, are running Harry Browne. Libertarians are, just as they claim, principled and consistent - they believe in individual liberty. Commendable as they are, and despite their reliability as allies in civil liberties struggles, you may notice that Libertarians sometimes prove that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and that there is a difference between logic and wisdom.

The libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles. And if he himself values his own goals so lightly, how highly will others value them.

I represent what I think is a traditional Republican... a limited government, fiscal responsibility, strong national defense, individual freedom and liberty.

It's quite amazingly radical, what their [the Kochs] vision of America would be.

I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Libertarians are constantly arguing with each other who is the most pure libertarian and who is most ideologically pure.

It has been said that I am not a 'real' Libertarian. A certain faction of the Party has come to believe that the writings of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman are the holy texts of Libertarianism, and I disagree. I believe that the Libertarian movement is and should be more encompassing than the narrow-minded advocacy of economic anarchy.

I am a conservative Republican, but I believe in democracy and the separation of church and state. The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please as long as they don't hurt anyone else in the process.

My contact with [Cato] was strange. They're ideologues, like Trotskyites. All questions must be seen and solved within the true faith of libertarianism, the idea of minimal government. And like Trotskyites, the guys from Cato can talk you to death.

The New Deal is inconsistent with the principles of limited government and with the constitutional provisions designed to secure that end.

I have one abiding religion-human liberty.

Take a very striking case in point: the Russian Bolsheviks. [Vladimir] Lenin created an alleged workers' party, which in every way reflected the Czarist machine, in order to deal with Czarism. And the danger and the hazards of trying to accommodate libertarian principles to the political process as we know it today is that one begins to dissolve the libertarian principles. So I would say that there is an inconsistency there that should be explored.

As a political party, the Libertarians have always been more party than political.

If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never intrust that instruction to any government; for the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat.