Top 40 Murray N. Rothbard Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

2. “It is clearly absurd to limit the term ‘education’ to a person’s formal schooling.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

3. “War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, Taxation is Robbery.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

4. “There are two and only two ways that any economy can be organized. One is by freedom and voluntary choice – the way of the market. The other is by force and dictation – the way of the State.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

5. “The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

6. “If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

7. “It is easy to be conspicuously ‘compassionate’ if others are being forced to pay the cost.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

8. “In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogans of “defense” and “emergency,” it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

9. “Whenever someone starts talking about ‘fair competition’ or indeed, about ‘fairness’ in general, it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

10. “Libertarians make no exceptions to the golden rule and provide no moral loophole, no double standard, for government.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

11. “For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the “intellectuals.” For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

12. “It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

13. “Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

14. “Exchange is the lifeblood, not only of our economy, but of civilization itself.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

15. “I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

16. “The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

17. “We wish to break with all aspects of the liberal State: with its welfare and its warfare, its monopoly privileges and its egalitarianism, its repression of victimless crimes whether personal or economic. Only we offer technology without technocracy, growth without pollution, liberty without chaos, law without tyranny, the defense of property rights in one’s person and in one’s material possessions.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

18. “Where the questions concern governmental power in a sovereign nation, it is not possible to select an umpire who is outside government. Every national government, so long as it is a government, must have the final say on its own power.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

19. “The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property;.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

20. “Many people believe that the free market, despite some admitted advantages, is a picture of disorder and chaos. Nothing is “planned,” everything is haphazard. Government dictation, on the other hand, seems simple and orderly; decrees are handed down and they are obeyed.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

21. “There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

22. “For centuries the State has committed mass murder and called it “war”; then ennobled the mass slaughter that “war” involves. For centuries the State has enslaved people into its armed battalions and called it “conscription” in the “national service.” For centuries the State has robbed people at bayonet point and called it “taxation.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

23. “While everyone else must pay their debts or go bankrupt, the banks are permitted to refuse redemption of their receipts, at the same time forcing their own debtors to pay when their loans fall due. The usual name for this is a “suspension of specie payments.” A more accurate name would be “license for theft;” for what else can we call a governmental permission to continue in business without fulfilling one’s contract?”

— Murray N. Rothbard

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

— Murray N. Rothbard

25. “Once a state has completely withered away, it is an extremely difficult task to re-create it, as Blackwell quickly discovered. If Blackwell had been under any illusions that the Quakers were a meek and passive people, he was in for a rude surprise. He was to find very quickly that devotion to peace, to liberty, and to individualism in no sense implies passive resignation to tyranny. Quite the contrary.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

26. “The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

27. “The last few centuries were times when men tried to place constitutional and other limits on the State, only to find that such limits, as with all other attempts, have failed. Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

28. “Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

29. “Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?”

— Murray N. Rothbard

30. “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.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

31. “While liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar expressions of liberty in action.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

32. “Man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual’s capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

33. “We conclude, therefore, that determining the supply of money, like all other goods, is best left to the free market. Aside from the general moral and economic advantages of freedom over coercion, no dictated quantity of money will do the work better, and the free market will set the production of gold in accordance with its relative ability to satisfy the needs of consumers, as compared with all other productive goods.10.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

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

— Murray N. Rothbard

35. “Any increase in the relative size of government in the economy, therefore, shifts the societal consumption-investment ratio in favor of consumption, and prolongs the depression.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

36. “Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.8, 9 Of course, one method of securing support is through the creation of vested economic interests.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

37. “It is infinitely better to rely on the pursuit of economic interest by landowners or street companies than to depend on the dubious “altruism” of bureaucrats and government officials.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

38. “Mais uma vez, os ricardianos abriram caminho para o sistema marxista.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

39. “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.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

40. “In sum, freedom can run a monetary system as superbly as it runs the rest of the economy. Contrary to many writers, there is nothing special about money that requires extensive governmental dictation. Here, too, free men will best and most smoothly supply all their economic wants. For money as for all other activities of man, “liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

41. “If the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were, in many countries of the West, times of accelerating social power, and a corollary increase in freedom, peace, and material welfare, the twentieth century has been primarily an age in which State power has been catching up – with a consequent reversion to slavery, war, and destruction.43 In.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

42. “Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

43. “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.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

44. “What particularly needs to be done is to enlighten the public on the State’s true nature, so that they can see that the State habitually violates the generally accepted injunctions against robbery and murder, that the State is the necessary violator of the commonly accepted moral and criminal law.”

— Murray N. Rothbard

45. “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.”

— Murray N. Rothbard