minimal state Quotes

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.

That government is best which governs least.

I was brought up as a Republican. But when I realized that at the end of the day there wasn't much difference between a Democrat and Republican, I became a libertarian.

I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum.

Since government, even in its best state is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is that we should have as little of it as the general peace of human society will permit.

...I do not want a government that will take care of me, I want a government that will make other men take their hands off me so I can take care of myself.

He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means "I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve". It's easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help.

The less government we have, the better—the fewer laws, and the less confided power.

In the cabaret of globalization, the state shows itself as a table dancer that strips off everything until it is left with only the minimum indispensable garments: the repressive force.

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

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

The least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.

Good government has to mean less government.

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

The less government we have the better.

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited, to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified, but any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right.

The government is already into our lives a whole lot more than they should be. If I were president, I'd roll everything back. Everything!

As a libertarian I believe we should have a federal government simple and circumscribed enough to be run by an average, dull, normal American. With George W. Bush we have half the equation in place.

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

I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces - with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way government sticks its nose in everything, now.

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

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

Blest is that government where no art thrives.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.