80 Laissez Faire Quotes

Following is our list of laissez faire quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about laissez faire capitalism.

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Famous Laissez Faire Quotes

Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism. — Henry George

The less government interferes with private pursuits, the better for general prosperity. — Martin Van Buren

Government is best which governs least — Thomas Paine

That government is best which governs least. — Henry David Thoreau

Like all other contracts, wages should be left to the fair and free competition of themarket, and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature. — David Ricardo

The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering. — Lao Tzu

If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action. — Ludwig von Mises

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all. — H. L. Mencken

It is necessary that we stop, once for all, this ignorant meddling with other people's business. Each individual must be left free to follow his own path. — Aleister Crowley

The best way to put more money in people's wallets is to leave it there in the first place. — Edwin Feulner

Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. — Lao Tzu

Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire. — Ludwig von Mises

When taxes are too high, people go hungry. When the government is too intrusive, people lose their spirit. Act for the people's benefit. Trust them; leave them alone. — Lao Tzu

Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion. — Mario Vargas Llosa

Let individuals create real wealth, empower them, create something that they can leave for their children. — John Sununu

Short Laissez Faire Quotes

  • That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves. — Henry David Thoreau
  • That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves. — Thomas Jefferson
  • Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself. — Lao Tzu
  • Let what comes come, let what goes go. — Ramana Maharshi
  • Let them eat cake. — Marie Antoinette
  • No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention; let it settle itself. — Tilopa
  • Govern wisely, and as little as possible — Sam Houston
  • Simplify rules, regulations, and laws. Get government out of the business of micromanaging. — Edward O. Thorp
  • Do your best and then relax. Let things go on in a natural way, rather than force them. — Paramahansa Yogananda
  • Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere. — Ronald Reagan
Laissez faire quote Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.
Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.

Laissez Faire Capitalism Quotes

Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat. — George Soros

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. — Gore Vidal

Laissez faire quote Always remember: be kind, be fair, be honest, be true and all of these things will return to you.
Always remember: be kind, be fair, be honest, be true and all of these things will return to you.

I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez-faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit. — Rose Wilder Lane

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. — Ayn Rand

Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished. — Nicolas Sarkozy

The laissez-faire argument relies on the same tacit appeal to perfection as does communism. — George Soros

Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital. — Benjamin Tucker

The Romanticists predominantly, were enemies of capitalism, which they regarded as a prosaic, materialistic, “petty bourgeois” system — never realizing that it was the only system that could make freedom, individuality and the pursuit of values possible in practice. — Ayn Rand

My parents couldnt be looser. It was the ultimate laissez faire upbringing. — Charlie Trotter

People Writing About Laissez Faire

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Read quotes by Lao Tzu

Lao Tzu
quotes on balance, life and leadership

1418 11725
Read quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau
quotes on nature, civil disobedience and solitude

2697 19655
Read quotes by Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises
quotes on socialism

541 3009
Read quotes by Henry George

Henry George
quotes on education, government and slavery

76 377
Read quotes by Martin Van Buren

Martin Van Buren
quotes on andrew jackson

43 678
Read quotes by Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine
quotes on tyranny, freedom and democracy

497 6157

More Laissez Faire Quotes

Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter's prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes' excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud. — Benito Mussolini

Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat. — George Soros

Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. — Ludwig von Mises

There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course. Just as cotton manufactures were created by the help of protective tariffs, export bounties, and indirect wage subsidies, laissez-faire was enforced by the state. — Karl Polanyi

Political economy is the science of free society. Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxims, Laissez-faire and 'Pas trop gouverner' are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least. — George Fitzhugh

Laissez-faire, supply and demand-one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egotism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause-it is the gospel of despair. — Thomas Carlyle

I clearly believe a lot more than some of my coalition colleagues - Tories - in redistribution and using the tax system for that purpose. I also believe in the government having an active role in the economy, which is having an industrial strategy. I'm not a believer in laissez-faire. — Vince Cable

Laissez Faire, laissez passer. Let it be, let it pass. The phrase is not readily translatable. It was widely used by the Physiocrats in urging freedom from government interference and was adopted by Adam Smith. — Francois Quesnay

In a laissez-faire society, there could exist no public institution with the power to forcefully protect people from themselves. From other people (criminals), yes. From one's own self, no. — Karl Hess

There is nothing in the basic principles of liberalism to make it a stationary creed; there are no hard-and-fast rules fixed once and for all. ... Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire. — Friedrich August von Hayek

...whatever the self-righteous excesses of the environmentalist left, it is impossible to be true to traditional conservative values (to say nothing of the Christian faith conservatives like me profess) and hold laissez faire attitudes about the use and abuse of the natural world. — Rod Dreher

Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family. — Steven Pinker

I believe, unlike people that are totally free-market, laissez-faire fundamentalists, that there is an important role that the government can play - one, in providing public goods, whether it's education, health care, or other things, and two, supervising countercyclical policy - stimulus, whether it's monetary, fiscal, or otherwise. — Nouriel Roubini

Whats the biggest commercial for aggression, sexuality and materialism? What gets pumped into these kids heads? Taking someone elses girl, which is so laissez-faire in hip-hop, will get you killed in the streets, but it doesnt seem to be an issue when you hear it on the radio. — Lupe Fiasco

When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain. — Robert Kuttner

In stark contrast with the views of the Greek philosophers and with those of the rest of western intellectuals to the present day, Chinese Taoist thought always defended individual liberty and laissez-faire while attacking the systematic and coercive use of violence typical of government. — Jesus Huerta de Soto

Capitalism is the only system that can make freedom, individuality, and the pursuit of values possible in practice. When I say 'capitalism,' I mean a pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism - with a separation of economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as a separation of state and church. — Ayn Rand

With laissez-faire and price atomic, ecology's uneconomic, But with another kind of logic economy's unecologic. — Kenneth E. Boulding

[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire. — John Maynard Keynes

I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy. — Ayn Rand

The man who accepts the laissez-faire doctrine would allow his garden to grow wild so that roses might fight it out with the weeds and the fittest might survive. — John Ruskin

Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught — John Maynard Keynes

There's always something impressive when people are giving themselves to their job absolutely. The military thing - I was conscious that their routine, their way of living is so opposite to mine. In some ways their life seemed intolerable to me. But, mine would be to them, too, because this strangely laissez-faire life of mine actually comes with its obligations as well. — Geoff Dyer

Here we are, then, once more back at the old doctrine - Laissez faire. Let us translate it into blunt English, and it will read, Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way. — William Graham Sumner

My god has always been a laissez-faire deity, giving you the initial goods and sending you on to make your way. — Jane Hamilton

I'm fine with whatever comes my way, and whatever doesn't come my way I'm fine with too. I have a very laissez-faire attitude with the whole thing. — Alice Sebold

So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by the classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit, which process is known as 'education'. — Emma Goldman

Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires. — Jerry Pournelle

The scope of modern government in what it can and ought to accomplish for its people has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old "laissez faire" school of political rights, and the widening has met popular approval. — William Howard Taft

Education in democracy must be carried on within the Party so that members can understand the meaning of democratic life, the meaning of the relationship between democracy and centralism, and the way in which democratic centralism should be put into practice. Only in this way can we really extend democracy within the Party and at the same time avoid ultra-democracy and the laissez-faire that destroys discipline. — Mao Zedong

[I am against] the Treaty of Rome which entrenches laissez faire as its philosophy and chooses bureaucracy as its administrative method. — Tony Benn

I've got some repenting to do. I doubt, however, that those who have wedded Christianity with laissez-faire capitalism will see things this way. I can just hear them saying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — Tony Campolo

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