Harry Browne Quotes

Everything you want in life has a price connected to it. There's a price to pay if you want to make things better, a price to pay just of leaving thing as they are, a price for everything.

To be self-reliant is to recognize that no one else is as concerned about your future as you are and that no one knows as much about you as you do.

When someone accuses you of being selfish, just remember that he's upset only because you aren't doing what he selfishly wants you to do.

A free person doesn't try to remake the world of his friends or his family. He merely appraises every situation by the simple standard: Is this what I want for myself? If it isn't, he looks elsewhere. If it is, he relaxes and enjoys it — without the problems most other people take for granted.

No one ever died from smoking marijuana, but millions of people have died by believing politicians. So why is marijuana outlawed while politicians are still legal?

There already are 20,000 federal gun laws and regulations on the books. If those laws haven't made America safe by now, why should we think 20,001 laws will suffice? We shouldn't. Instead, we need to recognize that those 20,000 laws are a principal cause of the current violence in society. They have made our children and all innocent adults much less safe -- by disarming innocent citizens and encouraging armed criminals to take advantage of us.

The Consumer Price Index is 15 times higher than it was when the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913. In the hundred years prior to the advent of the Federal Reserve, prices in America fell by one third.

Once its considered proper to use government force to solve one person's problem, force can be justified to solve anyone's problem.

I want government small enough to fit inside the Constitution.

Gun-control laws don't inhibit criminals, who rarely buy their guns in stores. But the laws do prevent you from defending yourself.

Governments don't protect you. They can't. All they can do is promise to make the person who hurts you pay for his crime — if they can catch him. The criminal won't pay you back, of course, so they punish him only as a deterrent to future crime. If you think the deterrent is working, why is crime always such a public issue?

Gun-control laws don't reduce crime, but passing them gives politicians another soap-box opportunity to pose as crime-fighters. Conservative politicians act tough by repealing the Bill of Rights, while liberal politicians act tough by outlawing weapons. Neither action reduces the crime rate. But both allow politicians to feel self-righteous, and both undermine our freedom.

I call this The Dictator Syndrome. You see suffering or danger, and in your imagination you see a government program eliminating it. But in the real world the program would operate as you expect only if you were an absolute dictator — having at your disposal all the government's power to compel everyone to do things your way.

You are the sovereign authority for your life. You are the ruler who makes the decisions regarding how you will act, what information you will accept. You do it anyway — but if you recognize that you do it, you can gain much greater control over your future.

Whenever the government fails to prevent a plane crash, the event is cited as justification for having the government prevent plane crashes.