Quotes from Murray N. Rothbard

it is surely grotesque to entrust the function of guardian of the public morality to the most extensive criminal (and hence the most immoral) group in society—the State.

the greater the credit expansion and the longer it lasts, the longer will the boom last. The boom will end when bank credit expansion finally stops. Evidently, the longer the boom goes on the more wasteful the errors committed, and the longer and more severe will be the necessary depression readjustment.

lifeblood, not only of our economy, but of civilization

La Boétie, Anti-Dictator, pp. 43–44. Whenever a ruler makes himself dictator . . . all those who are corrupted by burning ambition or extraordinary avarice, these gather around him and support him in order to have a share in the booty and to constitute themselves petty chiefs under the big tyrant. 11

The severity of the Wall Street crash, he argued, was not due to the unrestrained license of a freebooting capitalist system, but to government insistence on keeping a boom going artificially by pumping in inflationary credit.

If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned.

It is an ironic footnote on Peter Stuyvesant's frenzy at the idea of surrender that he passed his last days, in the late 1660s and early 1670s, in peaceful contentment on his farm in Manhattan, not only unmolested but in friendship with Governor Nicolls. Shorn of power, Peter Stuyvesant was a happier and perhaps a wiser man.

business cycles and depressions stem from disturbances generated in the market by monetary intervention. The monetary theory holds that money and credit-expansion, launched by the banking system, causes booms and busts.

For all governments—but especially democratic governments—must work hard at persuading their subjects that all of their deeds of oppression are really in their subjects' best interests

L'endoctrinement de la jeunesse dans les écoles était l'un des principaux piliers de ces États esclavagistes. En vérité, la principale différence entre les horreurs du XXème siècle et les despotismes plus anciens est que ces tyrannies modernes ont dû reposer sur un soutien des masses plus direct, et que par conséquent l'alphabétisation obligatoire et l'endoctrinement ont joué un rôle crucial.

All [government] can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

For money as for all other activities of man, "liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order.

In the long run, the robber destroys his own subsistence by dwindling or eliminating the source of his own supply. But not only that; even in the short-run, the predator is acting contrary to his own true nature as a man. We are now in a position to answer more fully the question: what is the State?

The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the "nonaggression axiom." "Aggression" is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.

For while libertarians have too often been opportunists who lose sight of or under-cut their ultimate goal, some have erred in the opposite direction: fearing and condemning any advances toward the idea as necessarily selling out the goal itself. The tragedy is that these sectarians, in condemning all advances that fall short of the goal, serve to render vain and futile the cherished goal itself.

It is not true that high wages make prosperity. Instead, prosperity makes high wages.

Abolition of the public sector means, of course, that all pieces of land, all land areas, including streets and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations, cooperatives, or any other voluntary groupings of individuals and capital.

The purpose of a man's act is his end; the desire to achieve this end is the man's motive for instituting the action.

Su renta por trabajo es más cara y su ocio más barato, así que tenderá a trabajar menos.

we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned.

The main drawback of the government sponsored transcontinentals was that they were not funded through market savings but instead government loans and land grants, and were thus not disciplined by profit and loss. By granting subsidies, the government diverted resources away from where consumers would have spent their money (and hence valued more highly).

Yet, after all, we are not wedded to a "royal prerogative," and it is the American concept that sovereignty rests, not in government, but in the people.

The best type of instruction is individual instruction. A course where one teacher instructs one pupil is clearly by far the best type of course. It is only under such conditions that human potentialities can develop to their greatest degree. It is clear that the formal school, characterized by classes in which one teacher instructs many children, is an immensely inferior system. Since each child differs from the other in interest and ability, and the teacher can only teach one thing at a time.

At the root of the women's liberation movement is resentment against the very existence of women as a distinctive entity.