Quotes from L. Neil Smith

The life of a gambler was somewhat checkered.

That's true. On the other hand, everybody has to start again, fresh every day, from wherever they are.

Nor did that intelligence provide him with an answer to his real problem. He knew submorons, many of them working for him, whose capacity to enjoy life was infinite compared to his.

the surest way to lie to others is to lie to oneself first. If you can convince the single soul who knows the falsehood for what it is, then everyone else is an easy mark.

With reflexes that were more like precognition, Han threw everything he had into an equally frantic bank.

Flexible armor is for bullets and energy beams. It's no protection at all against an unarmed man.

In a sense, the Republicans and Democrats had been professional athletic teams, striving mightily to defeat each other for the money, the spectacle, for victory itself, but for nothing else. They might even exchange members, who would be expected to play as hard for their new team as they had for their old.

the hunter's tools are deadly weapons, capable not only of feeding him and his family, but of defending his life, liberty, and property against predators and thieves—including tax collectors. Requiring more subtlety and dexterity than raw power, they can be wielded to good effect by women, or even children.

the Nazis burned books in public. Liberals suppress opinions that differ from their own through influences they want kept secret. The right wing destroyed books. The left destroys authors. —William Wilde Curringer, Unfinished Memoirs

Few things are more laughably pitiable than authority once it has been successfully defied.

Poverty is a solved problem - all they have to do is abolish taxes and regulations which cripple those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women and destroy their productive capacity, then stand back and watch the economy boom.

Collective states are constitutionally incapable of reliably producing anything but corpses.

As to the media, they are protected by the First Amendment, as they should be.

People in the mass media tend more and more every day to look and act like elected and appointed officials.

We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.

Each day, it seemed, another law was passed to impoverish and diminish them, punishing them for whatever success they achieved and rewarding their less competent and industrious neighbors.

If there were a generic one-word expression for 'one whose fear of the uncertainties of success moves him to surrender at the very moment of victory', it would be 'Republican'.

I propose a Constitutional Amendment providing that, if any public official, elected or appointed, at any level of government, is caught lying to any member of the public for any reason, the punishment shall be death by public hanging.

A libertarian presidential candidate isn't going to win anyway, so he can afford to say that all taxation is theft, and it isn't the job of a libertarian presidential candidate to cook up new ways to commit theft.

I'm as radical as libertarians come.

We live in times of wonderful technology and crappy politics. The task before us now is not to let the latter destroy the former.

You cannot force me to agree with you. You can force me to act as though I agree with you but then you'll have to watch your back. All the time.

Of all the groups that sometimes claim to own your life, family is the hardest to defend your individual sovereignty from.

The main problem is that for a boycott to be effective, you must first persuade thousands - maybe even millions of others - to go along, which is a lot of work and usually not successful.