Libertarians understand a very simple fact of life: Government doesn't work. It can't deliver the mail on time, it doesn't keep our cities safe, it doesn't educate our children properly. But people love to play a gigantic game of "let's pretend": Let's pretend the War on Poverty really does help poor people. Let's pretend the War on Drugs really does reduce drug abuse and crime. Let's pretend the right government program can keep the wrong people out of the country.

BROWNE, HARRY, Why I Am a Libertarian, WorldNetDaily.com, June 20, 2002

Government is not always best when it does nothing. It is not a violation of any libertarian principle for the United States government to bomb a foreign country, if by doing so it can protect individuals in this country from being burned alive by foreign terrorists. It is not a violation of any libertarian principle for the United States Government to guard its borders from people who may endanger the lives of its citizens; indeed, the existence of national borders is justified by precisely that purpose of protection. It is not a violation of any libertarian principle for young Arab men to be stopped and questioned in airport lobbies, while elderly American women are allowed to go blithely about their business; to subject the latter to such treatment would represent a pointless commitment to an abstract ideal of fairness that has no application whatever to the legitimate purposes of government.

I think it might be important to point out that this country is a one-party country. Half of that party is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn't make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians.

What is libertarianism, after all, but a half-plague on each of your establishes houses: a pox on the left’s craving to take away our economic freedom and correct the content of our thoughts, and a double pox on the Right for trying to jail us for our pleasures?

I think what distinguishes libertarians in this culture is the principle of self-responsibility. It is the idea that each able person has to provide for himself, his spouse, and his children; that the risks of disease and old age are an individual and family problem, and that the very least, food, housing, and medical care should not be given away by the government to able adults. It is that to shield an able person from the risks and obstacles of life is to bore them and weaken them, and to make life trivial. That idea distinguishes all libertarians, radical and not-so-radical, from the mainstream. It focuses attention not on the battles they have mostly won, such as free speech or the free market, but issues they continue to lose, such as free medicine.

Service to the State is supposed to exclude all actions that would be considered immoral or criminal if committed by "private" citizens. The distinctive feature of libertarians is that they coolly and uncompromisingly apply the general moral law to people acting in their roles as members of the State apparatus. Libertarians make no exceptions.

Any libertarian revolution that takes power immediately confronts a grave inner contradiction: in the last analysis, liberty and power are incompatible.

[L]ibertarianism is tied to a certain set of recognitions: that all organizations have the problem of decentralized information, that decentralized mechanisms are the best way to organize that information to produce good outcomes, and that the best results come when the individual is free to make his or her own tradeoffs while aggregating information. That's true whether we're talking about politics or economics or even social interaction. The best systems maximize the freedom of the individual, subject to the constraint of others in the system.

SMITH, VERNON L., Nobel laureate, Reason Online, October 9, 2002

If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.