Quotes from Murray Rothbard

Rights might be universal but their enforcement must be local.

The man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, 'Limit yourself'; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.

The more the government intervenes to delay the market's adjustment, the longer and more grueling the depression will be, and the more difficult will be the road to complete recovery.

All government operation is wasteful, inefficient, and serves the bureaucrat rather than the consumer.

Governmental subsidy systems promote inefficiency in production and efficiency in coercion and subservience, while penalizing efficiency in production and inefficiency in predation.

The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is to inflate and to destroy the value of the currency.

Government is a gang of thieves writ large.

I see a great future for gold and silver coins as the currency people may increasingly turn to when paper currencies begin to disintegrate.

The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress.

The best way to help the poor is to slash taxes and allow savings, investment, and creation of jobs to proceed unhampered.

What...can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.

Economics has revealed a great truth about the natural law of human interaction: that not only is production essential to man's prosperity and survival, but so also is exchange.

The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively 'peaceful' the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.

Many and subtle are the ideological weapons that the State has wielded through the centuries. Once excellent weapon has been tradition. The longer that the rule of a State has been able to preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon; for then, the X Dynasty or the Y State has the seeming weight of centuries of tradition behind it.

Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences.

While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient.

The State is a gang of thieves writ large - the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.

Libertarians regard the state as the Supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public. All states everywhere, whether democratic, dictatorial, or monarchical, whether red, white, blue or brown.

Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial government of Massachusetts emitted a fiat paper issue in 1690.

Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege.

If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and . . . try freedom.

Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue from coercion, from taxation.

The concept of life and perfection is incompatible. BUT so is death and perfection

Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the State is profoundly and inherently anticapitalist.