195 Quotes About Theft

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight. For this purpose I shall examine the consequences of certain economical phenomena, by placing in opposition to each other those which are seen, and those which are not seen.

Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism.

The demoralization that the debase­ment of the currency left in its wake played a major role in bring­ing Adolf Hitler into power in 1933.

Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to steal for you.

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.

The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but on the forcible appropriation of the fruits of others' labor.

Policymakers cannot take the situation lightly, for at its worst, it speaks to “intergenerational inequity” – a breaking of the social contract between two generations.

If government played by the same rules as the rest of us, it would cease to be government.