Skip to content

While individualism was once widely hailed in Britain and especially the United States, today it is deemed amoral and heartless. The individualist viewpoint is unable to promise honestly that everyone will eventually be completely well-off. Critics find this defeatist and insist that ‘we must do better’ while calling upon the forces of the state to see that we do.

— Tibor R. Machan Private Rights and Public Illusions (1994)

Another quote →

Topics

Society

More quotes by Tibor R. Machan

Without a market in which allocations can be made in obedience to the law of supply and demand, it is difficult or impossible to funnel resources with respect to actual human preferences and goals.

Ethics requires the kind of personal reflection, in the end, that no one else can do decisively for any individual.

The Promise of Liberty: A Non-Utopian Vision (2009)

The institution of taxation is not a civilized but a barbaric method to fund anything... it amounts to... a gross violation of human liberty.

If one behaved as a good citizen or a charitable person simply because one was dreadfully scared of the state placing one in jail, one would not be a good citizen or person but barely more than a circus animal.

Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being (1998)

Regulatory policies are inherently redistributive; that is, they involve the seizure of earned income for purposes of allocating this income in ways the government’s policymakers believe are more important than do those whose income has been seized.

Private Rights and Public Illusions (1994)

All Tibor R. Machan quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Tibor R. Machan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.