L. Neil Smith Quotes

"As a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: People, Fear, Talking)

"As to the media, they are protected by the First Amendment, as they should be."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: First, Media)

"The claim that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked because fundamentalists hate our prosperity and freedom is a ridiculous lie."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Lie, Freedom, Hate, Prosperity, Trade, World)

"Poverty is a solved problem - all they have to do is abolish taxes and regulations which cripple those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women and destroy their productive capacity, then stand back and watch the economy boom."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Men, Women, Economy, Poverty, Taxes)

"Beloved friends and comrades... the national Libertarian Party is dead."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Friends, Party)

"People in the mass media tend more and more every day to look and act like elected and appointed officials."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: People, Act, Day, Media)

"Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Man)

"It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Time, War, Truth, Lie, First, Reality)

"A libertarian presidential candidate isn't going to win anyway, so he can afford to say that all taxation is theft, and it isn't the job of a libertarian presidential candidate to cook up new ways to commit theft."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Job, Taxation, Theft)

"I'm tired of living in a police state."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Living, Police, State)

"I'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Being, Constitution, Exercise, First, Rights, Reason, states, United, Value)

"I'm tired of being considered property."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Being, Property)

"I'm as radical as libertarians come."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Radical)

"I'll remind you all, however, that for government, existence is a privilege, not a right."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Government, Existence, Privilege, Right)

"I propose a Constitutional Amendment providing that, if any public official, elected or appointed, at any level of government, is caught lying to any member of the public for any reason, the punishment shall be death by public hanging."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Death, Government, Lying, Public, Punishment, Reason)

"Government is waging war against the people."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Government, War, People)

"Collective states are constitutionally incapable of reliably producing anything but corpses."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: states)

"City governments ought to be abolished, if only as a public health measure."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Health, Measure, Public)

"It is individuals who must be encouraged to undertake the unprecedented - and unprecedentedly profitable - effort to prevent the annihilation of the human race."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Effort, Race)

"The fact is that surveys which media people openly admit to show that fewer than twelve percent of their customers believe they're doing a good job, while the average profit margin in television is in the neighborhood of eighty percent."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: People, Fact, Job, Media, Profit, Television)

"What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession, a war of independence, no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: War, America, Independence)

"We must oppose programs that would take food from the mouths of younger generations to buy prescription drugs for old people, and we must do it... for the children."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Food, People, Children, Drugs, Generations, Old)

"We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Government, Act, Freedom, Security)

"Violent crime is a solved problem - all they have to do is repeal the laws that keep those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women from arming themselves, and violent crime evaporates like dry ice on a hot summer day."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Men, Women, Crime, Day, Laws, Summer)

"The main problem is that for a boycott to be effective, you must first persuade thousands - maybe even millions of others - to go along, which is a lot of work and usually not successful."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Work, Successful, First)

"The first thing you need to know, in order to establish some perspective and avoid panic, is that the violent government excesses we're seeing today are far from unprecedented."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Government, First, Order, Perspective, Today)

"The War on Drugs employs millions - politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and now the military - that probably couldn't find a place for their dubious talents in a free market, unless they were to sell pencils from a tin cup on street corners."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: War, Drugs, Military, Now, Politicians)

"Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Civilization, Lies, Sea, Today)

"This planet is 15 million years overdue for an asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Years)