Top 60 L. Neil Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies.”

— L. Neil Smith

2. “Government is about stealing and nothing else. That’s all it’s ever been about. That’s all it’ll ever be about.”

— L. Neil Smith

3. “It’s often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that’s a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.”

— L. Neil Smith

4. “Violent crime is a solved problem – all they have to do is repeal the laws that keep those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women from arming themselves, and violent crime evaporates like dry ice on a hot summer day.”

— L. Neil Smith

5. “The Bill of Rights isn’t about us, it’s about them. It isn’t a list of things we’re permitted to do, it’s a list of things they aren’t allowed even to consider.”

— L. Neil Smith

6. “Choose your allies carefully: it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever be held morally, legally, or historically accountable for the actions of your enemies.”

— L. Neil Smith

7. “Choose your enemies carefully: you’ll probably be known much better and far longer for who they were, than for anything else you ever managed to accomplish.”

— L. Neil Smith

8. “What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession, a war of independence, no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s.”

— L. Neil Smith

9. “Government is waging war against the people.”

— L. Neil Smith

10. “And yet, what is bravery but the capacity to reject our fears, ignore and supress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do.”

— L. Neil Smith

11. “The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet’s development is as historically important to humanity perhaps even more so as Gutenberg ’s invention of the printing press.”

— L. Neil Smith

12. “The only hope we have is the Internet. We must strive to keep it free.”

— L. Neil Smith

13. “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.”

— L. Neil Smith

14. “Know when to give up a lost cause. Anyone who needs to be persuaded to be free, doesn’t deserve to be.”

— L. Neil Smith

15. “Guns cause crime like flies cause garbage!”

— L. Neil Smith

16. “I’m tired of being lied to by government, by the media, and by every corporation I have anything to do with.”

— L. Neil Smith

17. “Gun Control is mind control.”

— L. Neil Smith

18. “Once you’ve taken a public stand you know is right, never back down; anything less than a rock-hard stance will let your enemies nibble you to death.”

— L. Neil Smith

19. “Thanks to guys like Boss Tweed, famous for saying, ‘I don’t give a damn who does the voting, as long as I do the nominating,’ there hasn’t been an honest election in the USA since sometime around the War Between the States.”

— L. Neil Smith

20. “The most dangerous and successful conspiracies take place in public, in plain sight, under the clear, bright light of day – usually with TV cameras focused on them.”

— L. Neil Smith

21. “You’re people, in short, who must be stupid, insane, or evil to continue arguing in the face of indisputable facts and irrefutable logic that others must be forced into a state of helplessness and victimized by individual criminals or the state. Stupid, insane, or evil.”

— L. Neil Smith

22. “People who object to weapons aren’t abolishing violence, they’re begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically ‘right.’ Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.”

— L. Neil Smith

23. “This planet is 15 million years overdue for an asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs.”

— L. Neil Smith

24. “Try never to speak of your enemies by name. Any publicity is still publicity – and there are those for whom your disapproval constitutes a recommendation.”

— L. Neil Smith

25. “One thing about a police state, you can always find the police.”

— L. Neil Smith

26. “The function of government is to provide you with service; the function of the media is to supply the Vaseline.”

— L. Neil Smith

27. “Armed people are free. No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist, no mob can take their liberty and property. And no 220 pound thug can threaten the well-being or dignity of a 110 pound woman who has two pounds of iron to even things out. Is that evil? Is that wrong?”

— L. Neil Smith

28. “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.”

— L. Neil Smith

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

— L. Neil Smith

30. “The freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and Constitutional right – subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility.”

— L. Neil Smith

31. “Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon – rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything – any time, any place, without asking anyone’s permission.”

— L. Neil Smith

32. “I have long argued that we need to reopen Alcatraz to house government criminals, and let tourists on excursion boats in San Francisco Bay pay to chum the water with meat with an expired sell-by date that would otherwise have to be discarded.”

— L. Neil Smith

33. “What I want to accomplish artistically amounts to nothing more than fulfilling the promise of the American Revolution.”

— L. Neil Smith

34. “Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moments respite deserve only the end of a rope.”

— L. Neil Smith

35. “The War on Drugs employs millions – politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and now the military – that probably couldnt find a place for their dubious talents in a free market, unless they were to sell pencils from a tin cup on street corners.”

— L. Neil Smith

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

— L. Neil Smith

37. “Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave.”

— L. Neil Smith

38. “America didn’t have a drug problem before it passed drug laws.”

— L. Neil Smith

39. “The claim that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked because fundamentalists hate our prosperity and freedom is a ridiculous lie.”

— L. Neil Smith

40. “I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.”

— L. Neil Smith

41. “I’m tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution.”

— L. Neil Smith

42. “The fact is that surveys which media people openly admit to show that fewer than twelve percent of their customers believe they’re doing a good job, while the average profit margin in television is in the neighborhood of eighty percent.”

— L. Neil Smith

43. “Like the government, corporations must be bound with the chains of the Constitution, and especially of the Bill of Rights.”

— L. Neil Smith

44. “My current novel, Pallas, is all about that culture war – in fact it’s been called the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Sagebrush Rebellion – and yet what I hear all too often from libertarians is that they don’t read fiction.”

— L. Neil Smith

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

— L. Neil Smith

46. “Forget ‘redeeming social value,’ dirty pictures are fun. When I die I want my ashes sprinkled over a nudist camp.”

— L. Neil Smith

47. “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.”

— L. Neil Smith

48. “There’s nothing noble or selfless about politicians and there never has been. Putting it charitably, Profiles in Courage is a compendium of Democratic mythology, ghostwritten for an ambitious young Massachusetts Senator who never did a thing for himself if he could pay to have it done by others.”

— L. Neil Smith

49. “It is individuals who must be encouraged to undertake the unprecedented – and unprecedentedly profitable – effort to prevent the annihilation of the human race.”

— L. Neil Smith

50. “I’m as radical as libertarians come.”

— L. Neil Smith