Quotes & Sayings About Voluntaryism

The idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept. — Ron Paul

Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible 'anarchy', why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person? — Murray N. Rothbard

Private property and free trade stand on exactly the same footing, both being essential and indivisible parts of liberty, both depending upon rights, which no body of men, whether called governments or anything else, can justly take from the individual. — Auberon Herbert

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

I'm not scared of the Maos and the Stalins and the Hitlers.
I'm scared of the thousands of millions of people that hallucinate them to be "authority", and so do their bidding, and pay for their empires, and carry out their orders.
I don't care if there's one looney with a stupid moustache. He's not a threat if the people do not believe in "authority". — Larken Rose

If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers. — Ludwig Von Mises

It's amazing the amount of anger, hostility and hatred some people show towards those of us who want to leave them in freedom. Hysterically, some statists characterize that as the voluntaryists trying to "force" their views on everyone else. "You're oppressing me, by leaving me alone, and wanting me to leave you alone!" Meanwhile, they wildly cheer when some politician promises to extort and control them. Go figure. — Larken Rose

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure. — Isabel Paterson

Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here's one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population. — Jeffrey Tucker

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

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner. — Albert Jay Nock

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

Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced - in a word, insane. — Frank Herbert

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. — Frederic Bastiat

The man who is not permitted to own is owned. — George Santayana

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy. — Thomas Sowell

Beautiful, seamless upgrade from Twitter today, making functionality smoother and cooler. We didn't have to lobby, didn't have to beg, didn't have to elect a new leader, didn't have to push or protest. Progress is built in to the structure of the mechanism itself: this company exists to please you and me. This is a far better system than any political system on earth. — Jeffrey Tucker

Here's something I still can't get over. Amazes and thrills me every time. I'm sitting here and want a certain book. So I search, click, and then I have the book. Every time, my heart does a little leap of joy. What a beautiful world the market is making. — Jeffrey Tucker

History is the same story with different costumes. — Stefan Molyneux

An atheist who is a statist is just another theist. — Stefan Molyneux

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly. — Thomas Sowell

Poverty can be brought about by law; it cannot be forbidden by law. — Isabel Paterson

To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man that takes his earnings, must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so. It must not depend upon mere force; the slave must know no Higher Law than his master's will. The whole relationship must not only demonstrate, to his mind, its necessity, but its absolute rightfulness. — Frederick Douglass

If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized. — Lysander Spooner

The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
...
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers. — Lao-Tzu

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

Free markets are the real people's revolution. — Jeffrey Tucker

A person who says "every person has a right to a decent education" may not actually mean "people should be robbed to support bad schools" or "all children should be forced into a prison-like building for 12 years. — Jeffrey Tucker

Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to steal for you. — Ron Paul

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

Collectivists see the world the way Mr. Magoo did - as one big blur. They homogenize people in a communal blender, sacrificing the discrete features that make us who we are. — Lawrence W. Reed

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education. — Frederic Bastiat

It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands. — Auberon Herbert

People are more willing to support the exercise of authority over themselves when they believe it to be an objective, neutral feature of the natural world. This was the idea behind the concept of the divine right of kings. By making the king appear to be an integral part of God's plan for the world rather than an ordinary human being dominating his fellows by brute force, the public could be more easily persuaded to bow to his authority. However, when the doctrine of divine right became discredited, a replacement was needed to ensure that the public did not view political authority as merely the exercise of naked power. That replacement is the concept of the rule of law. — John Hasnas

Equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny. — Charles Forbes Rene De Montalembert

Freedom is the foundation for all wonderful things in life. — Jeffrey Tucker

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

The profit of the one is the profit of the other. — Frederic Bastiat

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

The problems in every country are the same. Bureaucracy is strangling innovation. Overgrown political sectors are sucking away resources that could otherwise lead to growth. Regulations and taxes are punishing innovation. Public sector services are breaking down and no longer serving people's needs. Laws and prevailing legislation control a world that no longer exists. People who go into politics to change the system end up getting co-opted by it. Workers feel trapped and fear a lack out options outside the status quo. In every case, it comes down to the great evil of our time and all times: government itself. There is no place on earth in which more liberty and less or no government would not be welcome and bring about real progress. — Jeffrey Tucker

The entire Nazi war machine was only possible because of past, present and future violations of the non aggression principle (achievable only through government). — Stefan Molyneux

The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly. — Isabel Paterson

What is a price? It is a proposed point of agreement between a buyer and seller. The proposal is the key. It is not a marching order. Past prices represent deals done in history. Current prices represent possible deals in the future. Prices embed vast information about perceived realities: resource availability, consumer demand, cultural biases and habits, speculations about the future. The price is also an amazing tool. It provides an objective basis for accounting and the assessment of profit and loss. Without prices, real prices rooted in real market experience, we'd been lost. — Jeffrey Tucker

Government is a gun that shoots money at your enemy and blows up in your face. — Stefan Molyneux

Historical definition of a country's borders ... ... here's where my murder geography ends and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderers to expand my murder-fest. — Stefan Molyneux

In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you. — Albert Jay Nock

Nationalism is pimped-out bigotry, designed to provoke a Stockholm Syndrome in the livestock. — Stefan Molyneux

When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force. — Ayn Rand

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

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. — Frederic Bastiat

It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost. — Murray N. Rothbard

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

Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract. — Jeffrey Tucker

- Government -
Free Shit for Idiots — Stefan Molyneux

Schooling that children are forced to endure - in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the "learning" is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children's true interests - turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children's natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels. — Peter Gray

To live in a state of liberty is not to live apart from law. It is, on the contrary, to live under the highest law, the only law that can really profit a man, the law which is consciously and deliberately imposed by himself on himself. — Auberon Herbert

I found most of my friends quite content to be used as tax-material, even though the sums of money taken from them were employed against their own beliefs and interests. They had lived so long under the system of using others, and then in their turn being used by them, that they were like hypnotized subjects, and looked on this subjecting and using of each other as a part of the necessary and even Providential order of things. The great machine had taken possession of their souls. — Auberon Herbert

Private property is redundant. "Public property" is an oxymoron. All legit property is private. If property isn't private it's stolen. — Gustave De Molinari

On the opening day of law school at Yale, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you. — Stephen L. Carter

An anarcho-capitalist is someone who agrees that the best way to eliminate the tragedy of the commons is to privatize it away, and realizes that state politics is the mother of all such tragedies. — Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish. — Frederic Bastiat

The welfare of a people lies not in casting other peoples down but in peaceful collaboration. — Ludwig Von Mises

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax. — Eric Hoffer

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

Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business ... because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people. — Stefan Molyneux

Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status. — Isabel Paterson

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

Some say it's wrong to profit from the misfortune of others. I ask my students whether they'd support a law against doing so. But I caution them with some examples. An orthopedist profits from your misfortune of having broken your leg skiing. When there's news of a pending ice storm, I doubt whether it saddens the hearts of those in the collision repair business. I also tell my students that I profit from their misfortune - their ignorance of economic theory. — Walter E. Williams

Set men up to rule their fellow-men, to treat them as mere soulless material with which they may deal as they please, and the consequence is that you sweep away every moral landmark and turn this world into a place of selfish striving, hopeless confusion, trickery and violence, a mere scrambling ground for the strongest or the most cunning or the most numerous. — Auberon Herbert

The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this
that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot. — Lysander Spooner

To create a free society is not to accomplish the impossible task of convincing all people to abandon aggression, but to accomplish the essential task of convincing enough people to abandon the belief that aggression is ever legitimate. — Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

A libertarian is somebody who believes, of course, in personal liberty. And liberty is a personal thing; it is not collective. You don't gain liberty because you belong to a group. So we don't talk about women's rights or gay rights or anything else. Everybody has an absolute equal right as an individual, and it comes to them naturally. — Ron Paul

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. — Ayn Rand

Democracy is a suggestion box for slaves. — Stefan Molyneux

Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's inhabitants, or subjects. — Murray N. Rothbard

Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid. — Penn Jillette

No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men. — Rose Wilder Lane

Justice requires that you should not place the burdens of one man on the shoulders of another man, even though he is better able to bear them. In plainer words, that you should not make one set of men pay for what is used by another set of men. — Auberon Herbert

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times. — Lawrence W. Reed

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Statism ends with an eye roll. — Stefan Molyneux

No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want. — Ludwig Von Mises

The government is ethics rape in perpetuity — Stefan Molyneux

There are two principles between which there can be no compromise - liberty and coercion. — Frederic Bastiat

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. — Murray N. Rothbard

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. — H.L. Mencken

I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. — Milton Friedman

The proposal to quit voting is basically revolutionary; it amounts to a shifting of power from one group to another, which is the essence of revolution. As soon as the nonvoting movement got up steam, the politicians would most assuredly start a counterrevolution. Measures to enforce voting would be instituted; fines would be imposed for violations, and prison sentences would be meted out to repeaters. — Frank Chodorov

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

When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign. — Stefan Molyneux

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

If you personally advocate that I be caged if I don't pay for whatever "government" things YOU want, please don't pretend to be tolerant, or non-violent, or enlightened, or compassionate. Don't pretend you believe in "live and let live," and don't pretend you want peace, freedom or harmony. It's a simple truism that the only people in the world who are willing to "live and let live" are voluntaryists. So you can either PRETEND to care about and respect your fellow man while continuing to advocate widespread authoritarian violence, or you can embrace the concepts of self-ownership and peaceful coexistence, and become an anarchist. — Larken Rose

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them. — Ludwig Von Mises

If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth; what rights are, therefore, inherent in him as a human being, necessarily remain with him during life; and, however capable of being trampled upon, are incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated or eliminated from his nature as a human being, or deprived of their inherent authority or obligation. — Lysander Spooner

No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire. — Lysander Spooner

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people. — Robert Higgs

Statism is an unnatural disaster. — Stefan Molyneux

Yes I pay taxes ... There are no ethics in the face of coercion, that is blaming the victim. Focus on the man with the gun, not the man in the crosshairs trying to survive. — Stefan Molyneux

Ultimately, we need to take control over the money supply out of the hands of our governments and make the production of money again subject to the principle of free association. The first step to endorsing and promoting this strategy is to realize that governments do not - indeed cannot - fulfill any positive role whatever through the control of our money. — Jorg Guido Hulsmann

People who can't imagine order without imposition always end up favoring power over liberty. — Jeffrey Tucker