Stefan Molyneux Quotes & Sayings

Those suffering from terminal falsehood seek out each other, like a drunk seeks out a wall so that he doesn't fall down. — Stefan Molyneux

Spiritual: religion without any rules. All the comfort of fictitious friends with none of their demands. — Stefan Molyneux

We've got this weird dysgenic situation where we're basically just paying idiots to breed and taxing intelligent people to stay away from each other with anything remotely resembling fertility. — Stefan Molyneux

Can social progress be made without government?
It's like saying 'can happiness be achieved without the initiation of violence? Can romance be achieved without rape? Can profitability be achieved without theft? Can economic growth be achieved without the mass indebted enslavement and counterfeiting of the federal reserve?'. — Stefan Molyneux

It is very hard to understand the logic and intelligence of the argument that, in order to protect us from a group that might overpower us, we should support a group that already has overpowered us. It — Stefan Molyneux

If there is no honesty, there is no relationship. The only degree to which there is a relationship is the degree to which you are honest. Expressing your clear desires does not make you a dictator and you telling what you think, feel, and what you want or don't want, is just called being honest. It doesn't control him at all.
You're trying to control others by withholding information by not getting involved and by not being honest. Withholding information is a form of manipulation. It is dishonest and it's destructive to a relationship. — Stefan Molyneux

The principals are quite simple. We can love people who treat us well. We cannot love people who treat us badly because, treating someone badly is not a virtue and we can only love virtue. I don't think that's controversial. I mean, there is no marriage therapist that I can imagine in the world who would say to a woman being beaten, humiliated, verbally abused, or completely ignored by her husband, "You just need to love him more. You need to work at making him happier." That would be sadistic in the extreme to say to someone.
So, in the same way I say, if anyone, I don't care if they are your priest, god, father, mother, or your Siamese twin cousin coming out of your elbow or ass. I don't care. If someone is treating you badly, that is not good for you. The solution is not you being so great that you both become better. That's not a realistic solution. — Stefan Molyneux

You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.
It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us. — Stefan Molyneux

Corporations are legal fictions created by the State to shield executives from liability ... It's like if I had a little hand-puppet, and I went to rob a bank, and the hand-puppet held the little gun and told people to hand over all the money, and then the hand-puppet grabbed the money and ran out, and then I got caught and I handed the hand-puppet over the police and then the police tried the hand-puppet, put the hand-puppet in jail, and I get to keep all the money. — Stefan Molyneux

A philosopher is someone who promotes moral excellence, argues for moral excellence, and gets other people to behave morally and excellently based on those arguments. — Stefan Molyneux

It's been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity - than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation. — Stefan Molyneux

The continual manufacture of enemies is essential to the growth of the fascist state. — Stefan Molyneux

Good philosophy is always hate speech to evil doers. — Stefan Molyneux

The price of getting men to fight is giving them respect. Men will fight to protect women they love, men will fight to protect children they have fathered, for obvious reasons, both moral and biological, but where a man is not respected, where men are 'cucked' . . . if men utilized and turned into a form of captive livestock, if men are enslaved to female vanity, protectiveness, emotional self-defense, what happens is men don't love their societies anymore because society is not giving them respect. The men are in the same relationship to society as an abused woman is to an abusive man. There may be attachment, an unwillingness or lack of capacity to escape, but there's no love. — Stefan Molyneux

States will invent obscure constructs like "white privilege" and "male privilege" because they are convenient to further the state's ends. They are untestable, unmeasurable, and unprovable, but they sound legitimate to those who consider themselves a casualty of society. Despite the lack of evidence, they put the burden on the white male to disprove the accuser. Since no such constructs exist, no method of defense is possible. — Stefan Molyneux

The move towards the extension of personhood to children is already underway, and is utterly, completely and totally unstoppable! — Stefan Molyneux

Trust is everything. If I didn't have trust, there would be no downloads, no show, and no business. — Stefan Molyneux

The law is an opinion with a gun. — Stefan Molyneux

If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don't think it's the children who need to be adjusted. — Stefan Molyneux

Promote the voluntary family; voluntarism is the only known cure for abuses of power - in politics, the economy or the family. — Stefan Molyneux

If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom. — Stefan Molyneux

Baseless victimhood is usually the last stage before outright aggression. — Stefan Molyneux

If the majority is moral then why do they need to be ruled by a group of people who are power hungry and gun hungry and probably not quite so good? And evil people want two things: they want something for nothing, and to escape the consequences of their actions, which is pretty much the definition of what government is. — Stefan Molyneux

So I'm explaining intrinsic value to my 4 year old daughter - who loves toy cats - and ask her, if she was really thirsty in the desert, whether she would like a bottle of water, or a toy cat, and she tells me that she would like a bottle of water in the shape of a toy cat.
Unarguable. — Stefan Molyneux

All money does with an empty heart is allow you to be miserable in style. — Stefan Molyneux

Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god. — Stefan Molyneux

Political correctness is anti-empathetic because it has correctness in it. We all have biases, we all have prejudices and if we cant talk about them openly - if we get attacked for it then this is an anti-empathetic movement and therefore it cannot complain about a lack of empathy. — Stefan Molyneux

Freedom for the government is enslavement for the people. When the government is free the people are enslaved. When the government is contained then the people are free. — Stefan Molyneux

Ideology is the opposite of philosophy. Philosophy is the curiosity which guides its inquiry according to universal principles. Ideology is a prior prejudice that seeks out an echo-chamber of reaffirming information. — Stefan Molyneux

The expression of preferences is the essence of love. — Stefan Molyneux

There's great peace in surrendering to principles — Stefan Molyneux

The war on drugs is really the war on people who buy drugs from people who don't lobby the government. — Stefan Molyneux

The avoidance of pain is the avoidance of life. — Stefan Molyneux

The processing of universals is the job of the unconscious. If we feed it the opposite it breaks; when it breaks we break and the people around us break. — Stefan Molyneux

The genuine values in America arose from rational thought and breaking with tradition, not from blind allegiance to dirt and cloth. — Stefan Molyneux

Democracy is the suggestion box for slaves. — Stefan Molyneux

The three most important words in a relationship are not, 'I love you,' but, 'Tell me more. — Stefan Molyneux

Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture. — Stefan Molyneux

You are born into this world without choice, into a familial, social, educational, political and geographical environment that is merely accidental. And for the rest of your life, everyone will try to convince you that you are responsible for this accident. — Stefan Molyneux

You cannot have an agency that defends your property, which also has the right to violate your property rights at will. That's like hiring a bodyguard that you pay to beat you up randomly. — Stefan Molyneux

We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years. — Stefan Molyneux

Sorry, but I have to be who I am. Everyone else is taken ... So be your self! Speak your truth - if there are people around you who tempt you with non-existence blast through that and give them the full glory of who you are. Do not withhold yourself from the world. Do not piss on the incandescent gift of your existence. Do not drown yourself in the petty fog and dustiness of other people's ancient superstitions, unbeliefs, aggressions, culture and crap! No! Be a flare! We were born that way. Born perfectly happy being inconvenient to our parents. We shit, piss, cry, wake up at night, throw up on their shoulders, scream ... We are, in essence, in our humanity, perfectly comfortable with inconveniencing others. That's how we're born, how we grow and develop. I choose to inconvenience the irrational. — Stefan Molyneux

SCREW CHILDREN!
That's the mantra of the world.
Instead of burying them with a national debt, shoving them in shitty schools, drugging them if they don't comply, hitting them, yelling at them, indoctrinating them with religion and statism and patriotism and military worship, what if we just did what was right for them? The whole world is built on "screw children", and if we changed that, this would be an alien planet to us. — Stefan Molyneux

Evil is a confession of inadequacy — Stefan Molyneux

The ones who are insane enough to think that they can rule the world are always the ones who do. — Stefan Molyneux

Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep. — Stefan Molyneux

We are creatures built on a house of cards of language. — Stefan Molyneux

The unconscious is the true accumulation of your history.
It can be accepted or rejected but it can't fundamentally be altered. — Stefan Molyneux

I try not to be around people who want me to be somebody else. Fundamentally you can't be somebody else. You can only be less of who you are. — Stefan Molyneux

The vast majority of people are unthinking prejudice machines. — Stefan Molyneux

There's a huge swath of humanity that has developed verbal abilities to extract resources from guilt-ridden people.
They used to be priests, and now they're leftists. — Stefan Molyneux

You are constantly being trained to be heroic only in the service of your masters - only in slaughter and sacrifice and subjugation. But there is no heroism in serving your masters. Real heroism is questioning why you have masters at all.
All these stories, all these fantasies, all these superpowers - are designed to steal heroism from you, to make it impossible, fantastical, remote, and unachievable - and make you useful to your masters (as a hit man, if needed). What is the opposite of this?
The opposite of fantasy is philosophy. The opposite of mythology is integrity. And integrity is truth in action. — Stefan Molyneux

The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. "I'm freeeee ... SPLAT!". — Stefan Molyneux

Evil ethicists are the holocaust of humanity; if philosophy can be the instant sunlight to their endless vampirism, it will save more lives than all the doctors who have ever lived. — Stefan Molyneux

All atheists must examine the Non Aggression Principle. — Stefan Molyneux

The essence of wisdom is learning the value of "staying in the conversation," even when it makes you uncomfortable. Especially when it makes you uncomfortable. — Stefan Molyneux

Irrational expectations are at the root of most human suffering. — Stefan Molyneux

One of the best ways of repressing emotions is artificial certainty. — Stefan Molyneux

We raise predators by treating children as prey. — Stefan Molyneux

We cannot build on peace on blood. We are still so addicted to this lie. We have this fantasy that we honor the dead by adding to their number. What we need to do is remember that these bodies bury us. This ocean of blood that we create through the fantasy that violence brings virtue drowns us, drowns our children, drowns our future, drowns the world. We have to understand that when we pour these endless young bodies into this pit of death, we follow ... — Stefan Molyneux

It is so irresponsible for people in the 'I want to change the course of my society' community to not do the damn research into figuring out the latest science of how people change their minds, and under what conditions people change their minds, and what exactly in their minds is being changed.

The belief systems people hold are absolutely, in no way, shape, or form the result of any objective evaluation of information. The prejudices are inherited, they're socially inflicted, they're propagandized in school, in church, in communities, in families. They are reinforced by endless bouts of patriotic media and all of this nonsense. People are an emotional Gordian knot kaleidoscopic clusterfrack of prior prejudices stuffed into their heads and held aloft by the spears of social approval and ostracism. — Stefan Molyneux

The government is a giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential. — Stefan Molyneux

The ruling classes use broken and smashed up childhoods as weaponised instruments of domination around the world. This is why the government has no incentive to end child abuse; because the government needs abuse victims as enforcers. — Stefan Molyneux

If you look at America, which was the experiment of the smallest conceivable government, what grows out of that is the largest government the world has ever seen. — Stefan Molyneux

Don't try to sail your ship now by how the wind is going to be in three days.
You have to sail with the winds are they are now. — Stefan Molyneux

Ever wonder why the media never refers to 18 or 19 year old American soldiers as "armed teens"? — Stefan Molyneux

Eye-rolling is not exactly the pinnacle of socratic investigation. — Stefan Molyneux

You cannot connect with anyone except through reality. — Stefan Molyneux

The war is against children, and all the other wars are just a shadow of the war on children. — Stefan Molyneux

Democracy is a suggestion box for slaves. — Stefan Molyneux

Do Libertarians care about the poor? Well, we're not ladening them down with debt, we're not sending them off to God damned wars, we're not creating a permanent underclass, we're not trapping them in shitty schools where they graduate unable to read, WE DO CARE ABOUT THE POOR, and that's why we want the State out of their way!! — Stefan Molyneux

As a philosophy, utilitarianism is the argument you can objectively determine what is the greatest good for the greatest number of people and we need the state to achieve that end. — Stefan Molyneux

Our victimization in a way, can turn us into bullies because, the other person isn't doing something that we want and we get hurt. That way we get to bully that person and tell them basically you're a bad person for hurting me but, if you're burned all over and I give you a gentle hug and I dont know it, I'm not hurting you so to speak. It's the burns that are hurting you. — Stefan Molyneux

Love is an involuntary reaction to virtue. — Stefan Molyneux

Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology. — Stefan Molyneux

The only freedom is freedom from illusion ... — Stefan Molyneux

Which is another way of saying that people will pay good money to avoid the demands of virtue — Stefan Molyneux

The word "anarchy" does not mean "no rules." It does not mean "kill others for fun." It does not mean "no organization." It simply means: "without a political leader. — Stefan Molyneux

What we do not confront, we inhabit.
What we do not reject, we accept.
What we do not fight, we become. — Stefan Molyneux

The major abscess in the mind is a lack of acknowledgement of evil. — Stefan Molyneux

So bitcoin gives us an opportunity to reclaim the power of the people to say yes or no to what the government claims that it wants to do. — Stefan Molyneux

The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious. — Stefan Molyneux

The government is ethics rape in perpetuity — Stefan Molyneux

Deep connection is the antidote to madness. — Stefan Molyneux

In the same way Marxism robs workers of ambition, Feminism robs men and women of love. — Stefan Molyneux

We are haunted houses of history.
Nobody that we meet ever dies while we are alive. — Stefan Molyneux

Rights are something made up by governments to make you feel like you're buying something with your taxes. — Stefan Molyneux

The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive — Stefan Molyneux

Excuses are a promise of repetition. — Stefan Molyneux

To limit money is to limit political power. — Stefan Molyneux

July 4, the day we celebrate giving our political masters independence from conscience, morality, consequences for evil doing, and basic social and economic reality.
The fireworks are the glowing tears of your children's incinerated futures.
Cheer happy slaves - your only chains are your deluded joys. Cheer and sing, because for you, songs of death are easier than questions of life. — Stefan Molyneux

Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions. — Stefan Molyneux

Self-manipulation is our medication. Mythology is our drug. The only cure is honesty. — Stefan Molyneux

Social anxiety results from being around people who are resolutely opposed to who you are. — Stefan Molyneux

Dear Valued Customer: Your cable bill is now increasing 5% per month. You cannot cancel your cable. Ever. You cannot reduce your bill in any way. If you turn off your cable, your bill will remain exactly the same. If you rip your cable out of the wall, your bill will remain exactly the same, with the exception that we will charge you for the damage. Your children will be unable to cancel your cable contract. Also, please note that we will be reducing our delivery of channels by approximately 1 every month. As we deliver fewer channels, you can anticipate that your bill will sharply increase. If you do not pay your bill on time, the ownership of your house will revert to us, and we will lock you in an undisclosed location, where you will be forced to do tech support, and where we will be unable to protect you from assault and rape. If you attempt to defend yourself when we come to take your house, we are fully authorized to gun you down. Sincerely, The Statist Cable Company — Stefan Molyneux

We already live on the planet of war, we already live on the red planet, and it's a war against children. All the other wars are just the shadows of the war on children. — Stefan Molyneux

Politicians are propaganda, the people with guns are the enforcers and the media is the enthusiastic lapdog who enables the entire behavior and acts as the verbal abuser against those who deviate from nodding their heads at the vast statues of evil that we inherited. — Stefan Molyneux

Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy. — Stefan Molyneux

To connect is to dissolve the imaginary pyramids of artificial privilege. — Stefan Molyneux

Successful relationships are those relationships were conflicts are successfully resolved and in fact peoples intimacy, closeness, and love are enhanced through the resolution of conflicts. I have always become closer to my wife and to my friends when we have conflicts and work through them successfully because conflicts will always arise. They are an opportunity for intimacy, self-knowledge, and a greater connection. — Stefan Molyneux