Top 104 Quotes by Murray Rothbard

It is important to realize that gold and silver are international commodities and that, therefore, when not prohibited by government decree, foreign coins are perfectly capable of serving as standard moneys.

War has generally had grave and fateful consequences for the American monetary and financial system. We have seen that the Revolutionary War occasioned a mass of depreciated fiat paper, worthless Continentals, a huge public debt, and the beginnings of central banking in the Bank of North America.

Many and subtle are the ideological weapons that the State has wielded through the centuries. Once excellent weapon has been tradition. The longer that the rule of a State has been able to preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon; for then, the X Dynasty or the Y State has the seeming weight of centuries of tradition behind it.

Only individuals can desire and act. The existence of an institution such as government becomes meaningful only through influencing the actions of those individuals who are and those who are not considered as members.

Libertarians regard the state as the Supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public. All states everywhere, whether democratic, dictatorial, or monarchical, whether red, white, blue or brown.

Keynes was scarcely a 'revolutionary' in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.

The great fact of individual difference and variability (that is, inequality) is evident from the long record of human experience: hence, the general recognition of the antihuman nature of a world of coerced uniformity.