L. Neil Smith quotes

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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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)
The function of government is to provide you with service; the function of the media is to supply the Vaseline.
L. Neil Smith
I have long argued that we need to reopen Alcatraz to house government criminals, and let tourists on excursion boats in San Francisco Bay pay to chum the water with meat with an expired sell-by date that would otherwise have to be discarded.
L. Neil Smith
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
Taxes are a barbaric remnant of ancient times in which early farmers, tied to the land, no longer able to roam freely, unable to fight back with awkward agricultural tools the way they once could with hunting implements, became victims, first, of itinerant plunderers, then of bandits settling down beside them to become the governments we know today.
L. Neil Smith
Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moments respite deserve only the end of a rope.
L. Neil Smith
To politicians, solved problems represent a dire threat - of unemployment and poverty. That's why no problem ever tackled by the government has ever been solved. What they want is lots of problems they can promise to solve, so that we'll keep electing them - or letting them keep their jobs in a bureaucracy metastasizing like cancer.
L. Neil Smith
Socialism is, among other things, the political habitat of low self-esteem, incompetence, self-loathing, and a willingness to steal - or have stolen for you what you are unable or unwilling to work for. Socialism is a philosophy fit only for slugs, leaches, and mosquitoes.
L. Neil Smith
My current novel, Pallas, is all about that culture war - in fact it's been called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Sagebrush Rebellion - and yet what I hear all too often from libertarians is that they don't read fiction.
L. Neil Smith
Forget 'redeeming social value,' dirty pictures are fun. When I die I want my ashes sprinkled over a nudist camp.
L. Neil Smith
Money, first and foremost, is a medium of communication, conveying the information we call 'price'. Government control of the money supply is censorship, a violation of the First Amendment. Inflation is a lie. (L. Neil Smith)
Just as liberalism is the main force that drives conservatism and maintains its popularity in some quarters, conservatism is the reason liberalism continues to enjoy the traction that it does in our poor civilization.
L. Neil Smith
Thanks to guys like Boss Tweed, famous for saying, 'I don't give a damn who does the voting, as long as I do the nominating,' there hasn't been an honest election in the USA since sometime around the War Between the States.
L. Neil Smith
If conservatives really believed in individual liberty, as they endlessly claim - and if they used both halves of their brains - then they'd be libertarians. Instead, they sabotage themselves, and their cause, by constantly generating one spurious reason after another to deprive other people of their freedom.
L. Neil Smith
I always said that in a country where a legislature, its sessions limited by statute, could alter reality by turning back the clock (I actually saw this done, once, with a long pole pushing on the hour hand), any travesty was possible. I see nothing lately to prove me wrong.
L. Neil Smith