The truth is that no gun-control law works because ‘bad’ people who want guns can always get them. Either they’ll buy them in the underworld or they’ll simply steal them from good folks like you and me.
Harry Browne, “The Limits of Gun Ownership” (October 23, 2003).
Crime is not nearly the problem that injustice is. Rebellion (lawlessness) is a symptom of the . . . legal contradictions that are now constantly confronting the average citizen.
Tonie Nathan, “Individualism, Rebellion, and Crime,” Eugene Register-Guard, February 1977, in On Libertarianism: Historical Notes & Articles (1981).
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, was the only American politician to have voted against America’s involvement in both World War I and World War II.
Each man has the sole right to dispose of his own life. The recognition that the rights of each individual have priority over the demands of the state is an honored and traditional American concept.
Tonie Nathan, from her proposed preamble for the first Libertarian Party platform (On Libertarianism: Historical Notes & Articles, 1981).
Men and women are like right and left hands; it doesn’t make sense not to use both.
Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, was the only American politician to have voted against America’s involvement in both World War I and World War II.
I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does not control me. It can not even make me read Spengler, if I’d rather read a pulp magazine.
Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom (1943).
Bureaucracies established by prohibition are inherently inefficient and unable to discover the knowledge required to solve social problems. Prohibition also suppresses the market’s ability to solve social problems, so that little or no progress is made while prohibitions are in effect. And finally, prohibitions create profit opportunities which add to the problems prohibition is intended to solve.
Dr. Mark Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition (1991).
In our ignorance, we could not see that the Kaiser’s Germany and the Communist International were merely two aspects of the Old World’s reaction against the new, the American principle of individual liberty and human rights.
Rose Wilder Lane, Give Me Liberty (1936).
“Commerce makes the action of arbitrary power over our existence more oppressive than in the past, because, as our speculations are more varied, arbitrary power must multiply itself to reach them. But commerce also makes the action of arbitrary power easier to elude, because it changes the nature of property, which becomes, in virtue of this change, almost impossible to seize.
“Commerce confers a new quality on property, circulation. Without circulation, property is merely a usufruct; political authority can always affect usufruct, because it can prevent its enjoyment; but circulation creates an invisible and invincible obstacle to the actions of social power.
“The effects of commerce extend even further: not only does it emancipate individuals, but, by creating credit, it places authority itself in a position of dependence.”
Benjamin Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, 1819.
[W]ith the progress of society, government has within its sphere grown more powerful and efficient, this sphere has not been greatly enlarged. But the sphere of individual activity has greatly enlarged, and with the spread of knowledge the individual has become better able to maintain his rights against society, and governments are becoming less and less able to manage him.
Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), p. 447.