Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.

What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.

Libertarians recognize the difference between adults and children, as well as differences between normal adults and adults who are insane or mentally hindered or retarded.

If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?

The government has become a mechanism for distributing largess, and your census form is your ticket.

The reason the government sells the census as your ticket to getting goodies - rather than as your civic duty - is that distributing goodies is now all the government does.

Libertarians recognize the inevitable pluralism of the modern world and for that reason assert that individual liberty is at least part of the common good.

It is precisely because neither individuals nor small groups can be fully self-sufficient that cooperation is necessary to human survival and flourishing.

But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both left and right believe.

Equality of rights means that some people cannot simply impose obligations on others, for the moral agency and rights of those others would then be violated.

Libertarians typically argue that particular obligations, at least under normal circumstances, must be created by consent; they cannot be unilaterally imposed by others.

Achievement is no hocus-pocus. It's focus, focus!

If there are occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart.

He didn’t save women. He damned them.

So in the Libyan fable it is told That once an eagle, stricken with a dart, Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft: With our own feathers, not by others' hands, Are we now smitten.

Out of the dragon's claws and into the fire, there's a moment in every man's life when he must decide what is wrong and what is right.

If you want to enter a state of grace, question the assumption you’re defending right now.

Many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic.

Education is the great American adventure, the world's most colossal democratic experiment.

Resurrection, like politics, makes strange bedfellows.

We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.