Born September 24, 1966, Stefan Molyneux is an Irish-born Canadian philosopher, author, and podcaster who founded Freedomain Radio in 2004. With degrees in history from McGill University and the University of Toronto, Molyneux built a career in software before dedicating himself to philosophical discourse. His work explores themes of personal freedom, ethics, voluntaryism, and peaceful parenting. Author of several books including Universally Preferable Behaviour, Molyneux has generated extensive philosophical discussions through thousands of podcasts. His career demonstrates how digital platforms can democratize philosophical discourse and create global conversations about fundamental questions of human existence and ethics.
"The ones who are insane enough to think that they can rule the world are always the ones who do."
"To be yourself is in many ways to be inconvenient to others. Only placaters and appeasers get along with other people all the time and that's not really getting along with anyone. That's just self erasure."
"If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don't think it's the children who need to be adjusted."
"If there is no honesty, there is no relationship. The only degree to which there is a relationship is the degree to which you are honest. Expressing your clear desires does not make you a dictator and you telling what you think, feel, and what you want or don't want, is just called being honest. It doesn't control him at all. You're trying to control others by withholding information by not getting involved and by not being honest. Withholding information is a form of manipulation. It is dishonest and it's destructive to a relationship."
“When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter-argument they have is ‘being offended.’”
"Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology."
"No mean person is mean all the time. The whole point of being mean is to fluctuate so that you can hold out the hope for someone. So someone will hold out the hope that they're gonna catch you on the sunny side or that you're gonna be nice this time. The tyranny is inconsistency. Somebody thats consistently mean is something that is pretty easy to sort out. The reality is that the meanest people can be wonderful sometimes. That's the whole point of meanness because otherwise it's too obvious. It's the niceness that gets you trapped in the dysfunction. That is the problem and so the fact that you have this belief that there is hope in the relationship is foundational to the dysfunction."
"For the most part, people strenuously resist any redefinition of morality, because it shakes them to the very core of their being to think that in pursuing virtue they may have been feeding vice, or in fighting vice they may have in fact been fighting virtue."
"The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious."
"Yes I pay taxes... There are no ethics in the face of coercion, that is blaming the victim. Focus on the man with the gun, not the man in the crosshairs trying to survive."
"Conformity to the present is invisibility to the future."
"The answer to violence is the improvement of childhood."
"To connect is to dissolve the imaginary pyramids of artificial privilege."
"There's great peace in surrendering to principles."
"Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state."
"The entire Nazi war machine was only possible because of past, present and future violations of the non aggression principle (achievable only through government)."
"Almost all heroism is designed to make you inert by placing it in a context that you can't possibly act on."
"Baseless victimhood is usually the last stage before outright aggression."
"Successful relationships are those relationships were conflicts are successfully resolved and in fact peoples intimacy, closeness, and love are enhanced through the resolution of conflicts. I have always become closer to my wife and to my friends when we have conflicts and work through them successfully because conflicts will always arise. They are an opportunity for intimacy, self-knowledge, and a greater connection."
"Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering."
"The degree to which the psychiatric community is complicit with abusive parents in drugging non-compliant children is a war crime across the generations, and there will be a Nuremberg at some point in the future."
"If you want kids, choose your girlfriend like your future child has the deciding vote."
"The only relationships that exist are based on truth. Everything else is just a mutual and isolating delusion."
"What we do not confront, we inhabit.What we do not reject, we accept.What we do not fight, we become."
"Bullying is an attack upon the runts of the litter - the weak of the species, and it is predicated on a lack of bond with the parents. If a child has a secure bond with the parents, that forms a force-field around the child in terms of bullying. If the child does not have a strong bond with the parents, then it's like being separated from the herd - those are the ones who get picked off by the human predators in childhood and adulthood. So keep your contacts as close as you can, they provide an amazing shield against bullies and users."
"The processing of universals is the job of the unconscious. If we feed it the opposite it breaks, when it breaks we break and the people around us break."
"Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions."
"All atheists must examine the Non Aggression Principle."
"All money does with an empty heart is allow you to be miserable in style."
"There is nothing that is going to make people hate you more, and love you more, than telling the truth."
"Historical definition of a country's borders... "...here's where my murder geography ends and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderers to expand my murder-fest."
"The tombstone over the grave of the conscience always reads: "Human Nature"."
"Culture makes lies plausible through exposure to time. It makes prejudice seem like physics intergenerationally. It is therefore the most dangerous opponent of philosophy, because it feels the most credible to the average person."
"The greater the gap between self perception and reality, the more aggression is unleashed on those who point out the discrepancy."
"Good philosophy is always hate speech to evil doers."
"The ruling classes use broken and smashed up childhoods as weaponised instruments of domination around the world. This is why the government has no incentive to end child abuse, because the government needs abuse victims as enforcers."
"If there's more that you can do, then do it. If there's not more that you can do, then be content with what you're doing. But if there is despair, the despair can only be that you can do more. Because when you're doing as much as you can do, you will not feel despair. Because despair is the gap between what you could be doing and what you are doing."
"Can social progress be made without government?It's like saying 'can happiness be achieved without the initiation of violence? Can romance be achieved without rape? Can profitability be achieved without theft? Can economic growth be achieved without the mass indebted enslavement and counterfeiting of the federal reserve?'."