Biographies

The use of mathematics necessarily leads the economist to distort reality by making the theory convenient for mathematical symbolism and manipulation. Mathematics takes over, and the reality of human action loses out.

The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have an object — one thing to which they stick, letting all else go.

The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have an object — one thing to which they stick, letting all else go. Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application.

If you abjure all violence, you must abjure the state. Thus, while not all libertarians are pacifists, all pacifists are libertarians, whether they realize it or not (and, admittedly, a great many pacifists have not realized it). Gandhi, it appears, did realize it.

Fifty years ago, Rothbard saw the need for institutions to support scholarship, writing, publishing, and the exchange of ideas in the libertarian tradition. Otherwise, young people will turn to political activism and find themselves drifting left and right rather than staying on the path toward liberty.

It was while I was attending graduate school that I met Murray Rothbard. Rothbard followed LeFevre on the program and, although I do not recall the precise topic of his talk that day, I was extremely impressed with the joyfulness, affability, and sense of humor he projected. 

Childs was mightily impressed by what he read inside the covers of Rothbard’s books and by what he heard from Rothbard himself in that famous living room. And he was determined to pass his enlightenment along to the students of Objectivism.

Joan Kennedy Taylor first became involved in the libertarian movement in the early 1960s, when she was a student at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York City. As a student of Objectivism, she espoused the political views of Ayn Rand.

I defy anyone to read these stories and still aver that our leaders are cold-hearted folk who relish nothing so much as the specter of people suffering from poverty, and, to boot, are in the pay of rich capitalist exploiters.

Walter Block leaned on 82 of the world’s most prominent libertarian thinkers and asked them to tell their life stories with an eye to intellectual development. The result is the most comprehensive collection of libertarian autobiographies ever...