Entrepreneurship

Property rights, when well-defined and protected, create incentives for self-interested owners to utilize resources in numerous ways that promote the social good.

Only you can improve yourself to the point where you are competent and capable of defeating socialism within yourself. Only by so doing can you become able to serve the cause of freedom for all men.

I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

"There is much more certainty in a decentralized legal system than in a centralized, legislation-based system."

"There is no such thing as a nonspeculative investment.… In a changing economy action always involves speculation. Investments may be good or bad, but they are always speculative."

Private providers of orphan transfer can be expected to treat orphans with deeper respect than governments can be expected to; in a free market, in fact, they will have no other option.

Finally, the most interesting aspect of the giant credit-card industry is the simple fact that it works.

"Rothbard here is rather writing as an ideological polemicist about what thinkers are 'good for the team,' and his critiques even beyond this book often had that spirit."

Americans had no overall plan. They had something more important. They had personal freedom to plan their own affairs; and the avalanche of human energy resulting from that freedom swept from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande.

In a free market of justice, police making many errors would thus quickly be eliminated by bankruptcy.