Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Such security is equal liberty. But it is not necessarily equality in the use of the earth.
The right of the majority is absolute.
Aggression is simply another name for government.
Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.
The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.
We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.
The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.
Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.
War and Authority are companions; Peace and Liberty are companions.
We are here to let in the light of Liberty upon political superstition.
The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.
The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.
Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism
Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism.
But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder.
Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act.
But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.
The government is a tyrant living by theft, and therefore has no business to engage in any business.
To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.
Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.
This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.
Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?
If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
The main question ... is not what motive inspired the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with the law.
The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.
The shortest way to change a radical into a conservative, a liberal into a tyrant, a man into a beast, is to give him power over his fellows.
[T]he State . . . gives idle capital the power of increase, and, through interest, rent, profit, and taxes, robs industrious labor of its products.
An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.
Monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is Liberty's work, and Down with Authority her war-cry.
The Anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.
And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.
Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.
It is foolish in the extreme not only to resort to force before necessity compels, but especially to madly create the conditions that will lead to this necessity.
First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice.
Therefore coercion of the non-invasive, when justifiable at all, is to be justified on the ground that it secures, not a minimum of ' invasion, but a minimum of pain.
For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.
I have also seen it stated that Capital punishment is murder in its worst form. I should like to know upon what principle of human society these assertions are based and justified.
If I can go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbor, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich.
The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that 'the best government is that which governs least,' and that which governs least is no government at all.
I insist that there is nothing sacred in the life of an invader, and there is no valid principle of human society that forbids the invaded to protect themselves in whatever way they can.
The right of such control is already admitted by the State Socialists, though they maintain that, as a matter of fact, the individual would be allowed a much larger liberty than he now enjoys.
This brings us to Anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.
Government is the assumption of authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.
Marx, as we have seen, solved it by declaring capital to be a different thing from product, and maintaining that it belonged to society and should be seized by society and employed for the benefit of all alike.
Voting is merely a labor-saving device for ascertaining on which side force lies and bowing to the inevitable... It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet.
In the matter of the maintenance and rearing of children the Anarchists would neither institute the communistic nursery which the State Socialists favor nor keep the communistic school system which now prevails.
One thing, however, is sure, - that in all cases the effort should be to impose all the cost of repairing the wrong upon the doer of the wrong. This alone is real justice, and of course such justice is necessarily free.
The claim of the State Socialists, however, that this right would not be exercised in matters pertaining to the individual in the more intimate and private relations of his life is not borne out by the history of governments.
