A Quote by Molly Ivins

The Libertarians, of whom I'm rather fond, are running Harry Browne. Libertarians are, just as they claim, principled and consistent - they believe in individual liberty. Commendable as they are, and despite their reliability as allies in civil liberties struggles, you may notice that Libertarians sometimes prove that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and that there is a difference between logic and wisdom.

Molly Ivins

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Quote Author

Molly Ivins
American - Journalist
August 30, 1944 - January 31, 2007

In any society, order is the first need of all. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is tolerably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract liberty. Conservatives, knowing that "liberty inheres in some sensible object," are aware that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable "liberty" at the expense of order, the libertarians imperil the very freedoms they praise.

Russell Kirk

John Stuart Mill believed that the only acceptable reason for government to limit a person's liberty was to prevent him from causing unacceptable harm to others. Mill was not a libertarian, but many libertarians are quick to cite this principle when arguing against a regulation that they oppose. And I believe most thoughtful libertarians are prepared to embrace something fairly close to Mill's harm principle. But accepting that principle implies accepting many of the institutions of the modern welfare state that libertarians have vigorously opposed in the past, such as safety regulation.

Robert H. Frank

The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic.

Jacob Weisberg

Libertarians are believers in small government who really mean it -- no excuses, no exceptions. [For Libertarians], the excesses of government are their best recruiters.

Richard Brookhiser

I'm tired of people thinking that Libertarians don't have morality- that they don't have values. that's a lot of hogwash. Libertarians are the ONLY politicians with values.

Peter McWilliams

Some libertarians succeed by re-inventing the wheel. Most libertarians fail by re-inventing the flat tire.

Mike Cloud

A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being for any reason whatever; nor will a libertarian advocate the initiation of force, or delegate it to anyone else. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.

L. Neil Smith

Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.

Charles Stross

If conservatives really believed in individual liberty, as they endlessly claim and if they used both halves of their brains then they'd be libertarians. Instead, they sabotage themselves, and their cause, by constantly generating one spurious reason after another to deprive other people of their freedom.

L. Neil Smith

For years we've been told by secretive power hoarders we need to compromise some of our hot freedom for security. Civil Libertarians have always known that hogwash claim was stinkier than week old trout jam, and we have warned about compromising liberty in the name of safety.

Lisa Kennedy Montgomery

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong.

Jacob Weisberg

Libertarians recognize the inevitable pluralism of the modern world and for that reason assert that individual liberty is at least part of the common good.

Tom G. Palmer

The civil libertarians among us would rather defend the constitution than protect our nation's security.

Jeff Sessions

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional - a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.