"The supposition that competition means war rests upon old notions and false phrases that have been long current, but are rapidly passing into the limbo of exploded fallacies. Competition means war only when it is in some way restricted, either in scope or intensity,—that is, when it is not perfectly free competition; for then its benefits are won by one class at the expense of another, instead of by all at the expense of nature's forces. When universal and unrestricted, competition means the most perfect peace and the truest co-operation; for then it becomes simply a test of forces resulting in their most advantageous utilization." - Benjamin R. Tucker
"Destroy the rights of property, and you will also destroy both the material and the moral foundations of liberty. . . . But it is not only for the sake of liberty—though that is far the greater and higher reason—it is also for the sake of your own material progress—that you, the workers, must resolutely reject all interference with, all mutilations of the rights of property." - Auberon Herbert
"The right of the individual and the very fundamental principle of economics, which is 'The Science of Exchanges,' requires, not merely that the tax shall be equitably proportioned to the service which the state or government has rendered, but that it shall be only for such service as the individual has voluntarily accepted and made available to his use. The line between freedom and despotism is drawn just here. The form of government has essentially nothing to do with it, except as it may give a greater or lesser facility for disregarding the wishes of the taxpayer. The power of taxation is the very essence of despotism." - Joshua King Ingalls
"A free society cannot be the substitution
of a 'new order' for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free
action until they make up most of the social life. (That such liberation is
step by step does not mean that it can occur without revolutionary disruption,
for in many spheres—e.g., war, economics, sexual education—any genuine
liberation whatsoever involves a total change.)" - Paul Goodman
"What
we do demand, if you wish to put it that way, is that the State shall restrict
itself to the protection of person and property and the maintenance of Equal
Freedom, and then, in conformity with that principle, cease to compel anyone to
support it. If you wish to call what is left 'a State,' our only disagreement
will be on the use of the word." - Francis Dashwood Tandy
"Freedom is the adequate and only remedy for the excesses of freedom. Liberty alone, may lead to anarchy, or to the tyranny of individuals over the mass; but all the evils of Liberty are at once abolished by the application of Equality. Equality alone, may lead to the tyranny of the popular mass over the minority; but the application of Liberty at once abolishes all the evils of Equality. Fraternity, rendered obligatory, is the tyranny of the central organic force over both the mass and the individual: in connection with Liberty and Equality, it is the remedy for all social and political evils. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: this is the sacramental formula, not of an absolute democracy, but of a Constitutional Democratic Republic." - William Batchelder Greene
"War is the origin of the state and, in Randolph
Bourne’s familiar phrasing, is the health of the state. Modern war, grounded as
it usually is in the kinds of political and moral ideals, or claimed ideals,
which can justify almost limitless expansion of the state at the expense of
society, is very healthful indeed to any form of state." - Robert Nisbet
"But the 'practical' politician who, in spite of such
experiences repeated generation after generation, goes on thinking only of
proximate results, naturally never thinks of results still more remote, still
more general, and still more important than those just exemplified. To repeat
the metaphor used above—he never asks whether the political momentum set up by
his measure, in some cases decreasing but in other cases greatly increasing,
will or will not have the same general direction with other like momenta; and
whether it may not join them in producing an aggregate energy working changes
never thought of." - Herbert Spencer
"A little observation will disclose an individuality in
persons, times, and circumstances which has suggested the idea that one of our
most fatal errors has been the laying down rules, laws, and principles without
preserving the liberty of each person to apply them according to the
individuality of his views, and the circumstances of different cases. In other
words, our error, like that of all the world that has gone before us, has been
the violation of individual liberty." - Josiah Warren
"Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single
tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its
own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to
give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do
anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore
the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own
subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their
servitude. A people enslaves itself, cuts its own throat, when, having a choice
between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on
the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes
it." - Étienne de La Boétie
"Everyone knows that the people who can least pay their debts are the people who are always trying to. Among the poor a payment may be as rash as a speculation. Among the rich a bankruptcy may be as safe as a bank." - G.K. Chesterton
"For the present I should like merely to
understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities,
so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power
than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to
which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely
no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict
him." - Étienne de La Boétie
"When, under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes
mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated.
Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking
much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who
gain in this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and
calculating." - Frédéric Bastiat
"Censure, expulsion and excommunication for independents are as necessary to orthodox Socialist party discipline as they have ever been to the Church of Rome." - William Bailie
"But when the law, by means of its necessary agent,
force, imposes upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of
education, a religious faith or creed—then the law is no longer negative; it
acts positively upon people. It substitutes the will of the legislator for
their own wills; the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives.
When this happens, the people no longer need to discuss, to compare, to plan
ahead; the law does all this for them. Intelligence becomes a useless prop for
the people; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their liberty,
their property." - Frédéric Bastiat
"[T]he only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals." - John Stuart Mill
"Instead of a bumbling and inefficient tool of
society, the radical sees the State itself, in its very
nature, as coercive, exploitative, parasitic, and hence
profoundly antisocial. The State is, and always has
been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress." - Murray N. Rothbard
"A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the
clemency of their master, who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed
to the last extremes of injustice and oppression." - Edward Gibbon
"These very ways in which the dominant protective
agency or association in a territory apparently falls short of being a state
provide the focus of the individualist anarchist’s complaint against the state.
For he holds that when the state monopolizes the use of force in a territory
and punishes others who violate its monopoly, and when the state provides
protection for everyone by forcing some to purchase protection for others, it
violates moral side constraints on how individuals may be treated. Hence, he
concludes, the state itself is intrinsically immoral." - Robert Nozick
"Political
tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal,
conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria. The Human race divides
politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no
such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the
greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surely curmudgeons,
suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors
than the other sort." - Robert Heinlein
"Missing the point is a very fine art; and has been carried to something like perfection by politicians and Pressmen to-day. For the point is generally a very sharp point; and is, moreover, sharp at both ends. That is to say that both parties would probably impale themselves in an uncomfortable manner if they did not manage to avoid it altogether." - G.K. Chesterton
"The
rich, the owners of the already operating plants, have no particular class
interest in the maintenance of free competition. They are opposed to
confiscation and expropriation of their fortunes, but their vested interests
are rather in favor of measures preventing newcomers from challenging their
position. Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend
the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men
who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow and whose ingenuity will make the
life of coming generations more agreeable. They want the way left open to
further economic improvements. They are the spokesmen of material progress." - Ludwig von Mises
"Many
people still cling to the idea that the main function of the State is to
maintain Equal Freedom, an idea which has already been exploded, by showing
that the State is the greatest violator of the law—in other words, the greatest
criminal. How then can we expect it to protect us?" - Francis Dashwood Tandy
"Restrain by simple and efficient machinery the force and fraud that some men are always ready to employ against other men, for whether it is the State that employs force against a part of the citizens, or one citizen who employs force or fraud against another citizen, in both cases it is equally an aggression upon the rights, upon the self-ownership of the individual; it is equally in both cases the act of the stronger who in virtue of his strength preys upon the weaker." - Auberon Herbert
"It
is not the State, but the community, the worldwide community of all human
beings present and future, that we ought to serve. And a good community does
not spring from the glory of the State, but from the unfettered development of
individuals . . . ." - Bertrand Russell
"The
interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or
manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to,
that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is
always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be
agreeable enough to the interests of the public; but to narrow the competition
must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising
their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own
benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow citizens. The proposal of
any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always
to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till
after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most
scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of
men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have
generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who
accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." - Adam Smith
"There is no fusion possible between the political and economic systems, between the system of laws and the system of contracts; one or the other must be chosen. . . . In the same way, while Society maintains in the slightest degree its political form, it cannot become organized according to economic law." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Coercion
occurs when one man's actions are made to serve another man's will, not for his
own but for the other's purposes. It is not that the coerced does not choose at
all; if that were the case, we should not speak of his 'acting.' If my hand is
guided by physical force to trace my signature or my finger pressed against the
trigger of a gun, I have not acted. Such violence, which makes my body someone
else's physical tool, is, of course, as bad as coercion proper and must be
prevented for the same reason. Coercion implies, however, that I still choose
but that my mind is made someone else's tool, because the alternatives before
me have been so manipulated that the conduct that the coercer wants me to
choose becomes for me the least painful one. Although, coerced, it is still I
who decide which is the least evil under the circumstances." - Friedrich Hayek
"We no longer believe that it is just for one man to
govern two men, but we have yet to outgrow the absurd belief that it is just
for two men to govern one man. To govern a man—that is, to control him, to
dictate to him, to rule him—is to violate the principle of equal liberty, for
there is the same inequality between the governor and the governed, between the
dictator and those dictated to, between the ruler and the ruled, that there was
between a master and slave. The power to command and the weakness to obey are
the essence of government and the quintessence of slavery." - Charles T. Sprading
"As soon as I set foot in the parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in touch with the masses; because I was absorbed by my legislative work, I entirely lost sight of the current events . . . . One must have lived in that isolator which is called a National Assembly to realize how the men who are most completely ignorant of the state of the country are almost always those who represent it." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Our economists speak
of the failure of free exchange when, in the most vital process of exchange,
namely, the development of the expression of mutual trust evidenced in the
issue and circulation of paper promises to pay gold, we have absolutely
prohibited the most rudimentary freedom." - Henry Meulen
"I deny emphatically
that the present congested system of swollen trusts and underpaid wage-earners
results from unrestricted freedom of contract or free competition; on the
contrary, the industrial evil is due to State interference with the free
development of that essential mechanism of exchange, the credit system." - Henry Meulen
"The gist of the anarchistic idea is this, that there are qualities present in man, which permit the possibilities of social life, organization, and co-operative work without the application of force." - Max Baginski
"Anarchism is not a cult, nor a party, nor an organization. Neither is it a new idea, nor a reform movement, nor a system of philosophy. It is not even a menace to the social order, nor yet a plotting for the destruction of kings and rulers. Indeed, the social order has often been in danger either from false alarms or from its own weight since the fabric first arose. . . . Anarchism is none of these things. It teaches not violence, nor does it inculcate insurrection. Neither is it an incipient revolution. None the less has its place in the life of our times. Modern Anarchism, in a word, is primarily a tendency—moral, social, and intellectual. As a tendency it questions the supremacy of the State, the infallibility of Statute laws, and the divine right of all Authority, spiritual or temporal. It is, in truth, a product of Authority, the progeny of the State, a direct consequence of the inadequacy of law and government to fulfill their assumed functions. In short, the Anarchist tendency is a necessity of progress, a protest against usurpation, privilege, and injustice." - William Bailie
"And there are those like ourselves who see the State, both in its present form, in its very essence, and in whatever guise it might appear, an obstacle to the social revolution, the greatest hindrance to the birth of a society based on equality and liberty, as well as the historic means designed to prevent this blossoming." - Peter Kropotkin
"The truest condition of society . . . is that in which each individual is enabled and constrained to assume, to the greatest extent possible, the Cost or disagreeable consequences of his own acts. That condition of society can only arise from a general disintegration of interests,—from rendering the interests of all as completely individual as their persons. The Science of Society teaches the means of that individualization of interests, coupled, however, with cooperation. Hence is graduates the individual, so to speak, out of the sphere of Ethics into that of Personality,—out of the sphere of duty of submission to the wants of others, into the sphere of integral development and freedom." - Stephen Pearl Andrews
"These views of the industrial problem beget no feeling of hostility against the wealthy, for many of them are useful workers; nor of especial interest in those who work for wages, merely on that account. Many of them are employed not in adding to the genuine wealth of society, but in pernicious and destructive pursuits. They do, however, awaken an interest in those who produce in contradistinction to those who merely absorb and consume the labor-product of society. No especial blame attaches to any class. No one with true manly feeling can contemplate occupying the position of a hireling all his life without disgust. Nor can any true man feel that the account is wholly settled between him and his life-long helpers when he has merely paid them the current wages during his prosperity and business success." - Joshua King Ingalls
"Then we see not what there is to prevent the application of the doctrine to themselves by any number of individuals who choose. Nay, what is there to prevent its adoption by single individuals, and to make it not absurd for an individual to say to the state, 'I disown you; I am my own state; I ask nothing of you, and I will concede you nothing. I am a man; I am my own sovereign, and you have no authority over me but by my consent. That consent I have never given; or if I have heretofore given it, I now withdraw it. You have, then, no right over me, and if you attempt to control me you are a tyrant.'" - Orestes Augustus Brownson
"Throughout our society, a centralizing style of organization has been pushed so far as to become ineffective and wasteful, humanly stultifying, and ruinous to democracy. It is so in industries, government, labor unions, schools and science, culture and agriculture. And the tight interlocking of these central organizations has created, in my opinion, a critical situation. Modest, direct, or independent action has become extremely difficult in almost every function of society. We need at present a strong admixture of decentralism; the problem is where, how much, and how to get it." - Paul Goodman
"Labor-reform asks only that the recognized principles of property and trade which are the life of business, may be applied to money. If we want 'protection' we will contract for it. Abhorring favoritism we think that one privilege only should be guaranteed to usurers equally with other classes—the beneficent privilege of earning their own living. Rich people have been the subjects of charity long enough. Money covers a multitude of sins in which too many take stock." - Ezra H. Heywood
"Mutual insurance has shown, by practical exemplification, a little of what the nature, bearing, and workings of the mutualistic principle are. When the currency shall have become mutualized by mutual banks, and the rate of interest on money loaned shall have been brought down to zero per cent per annum, it will become possible to generalize mutual insurance, applying it to all the contingencies of life, so that men, instead of being, as now, antagonistic to each other, shall be so federated with each other, that an accidental loss falling on any one individual shall be a loss to be compensated by all other individuals, while a gain accidentally accruing to any one individual shall fall to the community, and be shared by all. Under the mutual system, each individual will receive the just and exact pay for his work; services equivalent in cost, without profit or discount; and so much as the individual laborer will then get over and above what he has earned will come to him as his share in the general prosperity of the community of which he is an individual member. The principle of mutuality in social economy is identical with the principle of federation in politics. Make of note of this last fact. Individual sovereignty is the John the Baptist, without whose coming the mutualistic idea remains void. There is no mutualism without reciprocal consent; and none but individuals can enter into voluntary mutual relations. Mutualism is the synthesis of liberty and order." - William Batchelder Greene
"Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly." - Friedrich Hayek
"That mankind are not infallible; that their truths, for the most part, are only half-truths; that unity of opinion, unless resulting from the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions, is not desirable, and diversity not an evil, but a good, until mankind are much more capable than at present of recognizing all sides of the truth, are principles applicable to men’s modes of action, not less than to their opinions. As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself." - John Stuart Mill
"Passing from the consideration of the possible, to that of the actual, we find yet further reason to deny the rectitude of property in land. It can never be pretended that the existing titles to such property are legitimate. Should any one think so, let him look in the chronicles. Violence, fraud, the prerogative of force, the claims of superior cunning—these are the sources to which those titled may be traced. The original deeds were written with the sword, rather than with the pen: not lawyers, but soldiers, were the conveyancers: blows were the current coin given in payment; and for seals, blood was used in preference to wax. Could valid claims be thus constituted? Hardly. And if not, what becomes of the pretensions of all subsequent holders of estates so obtained? Does sale or bequest generate a right where it did not previously exist? Would the original claimants be nonsuited at the bar of reason, because the thing stolen from them had changed hands? Certainly not. And if one act of transfer can give no title, can many?" - Herbert Spencer
"The whole force of your letter, as a defence of Irish landlords, rests upon the assumption that they are the real and true owners of the lands they now hold. But this assumption is a false one. These lands, largely or mostly, were originally taken by the sword, and have ever since been held by the sword. Neither the original robbers, nor any subsequent holders, have ever had any other than a robber's title to them. And robbery gives no better title to lands than it does to any other property.
"No lapse of time can cure this defect in the original title. Every successive holder not only indorses all the robberies of all his predecessors, but he commits a new one himself by withholding the lands, either from the original and true owners, or from those who, but for those robberies, would have been their legitimate heirs and assigns." - Lysander Spooner
"The philosophy of anarchism is included in the one word 'Liberty;' yet it is comprehensive enough to include all things else. No barriers whatever to human progression, to thought, or investigation, are placed by anarchism; nothing is considered so true or so certain, that future discoveries may not prove it false; therefore, it has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, 'Freedom.' Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully. Other schools of thought are composed of crystallized ideas—principles that are caught and impaled between the planks of long platforms, and considered too sacred to be disturbed by a close investigation. In all other 'issues' there is always a limit; some imaginary line beyond which the searching mind dare not penetrate, lest some pet idea melt into a myth. Science has been merciless and without reverence, because it is compelled to be: the discoveries and conclusions of one day are exploded by the discoveries and conclusions of the next. But anarchism is the usher of science—the master of ceremonies to all forms of truth." - Albert R. Parsons
"The ideal of anarchism is a society in which all individuals can do whatever they choose, except interfere with the ability of other individuals to do what they choose. This ideal is called anarchy, from the Greek anarchia, meaning absence of government.
"Anarchists do not supposed that all people are altruistic, or wise, or good, or identical, or perfectible, or any romantic nonsense of that kind. They believe that a society without coercive institutions is feasible, within the repertoire of natural, imperfect, human behaviour." - Donald Rooum
"It is only within recent times (except, perhaps, during periods when church and state were one, thus endowing political coercion with divine sanction) that the mass of people has consciously or implicitly accepted the Hegelian dictum that 'the state is the general substance, whereof individuals are but the accidents.' It is this acceptance of the state as 'substance,' as a suprapersonal reality, and its investment with a competence no individual can lay claim to, that is the special characteristic of the twentieth century." - Frank Chodorov
"I look at human government as it is; I analyze it as it is; I denounce it as it is; and as it is I pronounce it a system of legalized warfare upon the prerogative of Duty." - Henry C. Wright
"What else can be expected of it than theft, robbery, and injustice. . . . Human government has made the earth a slaughter house of the human race for 6,000 years." - Henry C. Wright
"If an age is imbued with an error, some always derive advantage from the error, while the rest have to suffer from it." - Max Stirner
"That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind." - J.R.R. Tolkien
"The real Egoist is not even he who has merely seen through the cheat of Moralism, but he who has outgrown its habitual sway, broken its scepter, desecrated every shrine of superstition in his heart or else been more happily born and reared than one in ten thousand of those who live today or ever lived." - James L. Walker
"Man is an idolater or symbol-worshipper by nature, which, of course, is no fault of his; but sooner or later all his local and temporary symbols must be ground to powder, like the golden calf,—word-images as well as metal and wooden ones. Rough work, iconoclasm,—but the only way to get at truth." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Human progress never will begin in earnest till every man is taught to feel his own divinity." - Henry Appleton
"The creative individual is a danger to society and so society holds and destroys the individual who is beginning to awaken, to be discontented, searching, experiencing. Authority in any form is evil, and I am using that word without any condemnation. As a cobra is poisonous, so authority is poisonous. You may laugh, but your laughter is an indication that you are brushing it off; you do not really see the poisonous nature of authority. Authority leads you to security, safety; at least you think it does, but it does not—it destroys you." - J. Krishnamurti
"The State, instead of being the guardian of the weak, the dispenser of justice, on close investigation turns out to be the convenient instrument of strong, crafty and ambitious men to further their own interests. Notwithstanding its democratic form, government to-day as in the past is at bottom but the police organization of the propertied classes for the guarantee of their privileges. Were it not for this necessity to uphold the privileges of property by force, the State would have no valid reason for existence." - William Bailie
"We live in a time of compounded hypocrisy of such scope and sophistication that not many seem able to apprehend the nature of it all, let alone possess or come by the intellectual tools necessary to penetrate even its outer layers. We hear from the loudest of our pacemakers what amounts to a constant psychological warfare, though purporting to advocate with mind-numbing decibels 'balance,' 'moderation,' 'intellectual and academic freedom,' the 'need to know,' as well as many other civic virtues such as 'the right to hear both sides' and the like . . . ." - James J. Martin
"To discover errors in axioms, or first principles grounded in facts, is like the breaking of a charm. The enchanted castle, the steepy rock, the burning lake disappear: and the paths that lead to truth, which we imagined to be so long, so embarrassed, and so difficult, show as they are, short, open and easy." - Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
"In place of duty I put—nothing. Superstitions never want replacing, or we should never advance to freedom. Waste not your energies, but turn them all to your own advantage. Instead of pretending to be 'doing my duty,' I will in the future go direct to the naked truth, acknowledge I am actuated in all I do by self-interest, and economize in brain-power. What I want is to discover where my true, most lasting interests lie. I am the more likely to find that out, if I allow no moral considerations to obscure my view." - John Badcock, Jr.
"We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them." - Benjamin R. Tucker
"Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as Individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men." - John Stuart Mill
"Everywhere it seems to have been taken for granted that force and violence are necessary to man's welfare upon the earth. Endless volumes have been written, and countless lives been sacrificed in an effort to prove that one form of government is better than another; but few seem seriously to have considered the proposition that all government rests on violence and force, is sustained by soldiers, policemen and courts, and is contrary to the ideal peace and order which make for the happiness and progress of the human race." - Clarence Darrow
"The horrors of England's industrial life in the last century furnish a standing brief for addicts of positive intervention. Child-labour and woman-labour in the mills and mines; Coketown and Mr. Bounderby; starvation wages; killing hours; vile and hazardous conditions of labour; coffin ships officered by ruffians—all these are glibly charged off by reformers and publicists to a regime of rugged individualism, unrestrained competition, and laissez-faire. This is an absurdity on its face, for no such regime ever existed in England. They were due to the State's primary intervention whereby the population of England was expropriated from the land; due to the State's removal of the land from competition with industry for labour. Nor did the factory system and the 'industrial revolution' have the least thing to do with creating those hordes of miserable beings. When the factory system came in, those hordes were already there, expropriated, and they went into the mills for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Plugson of Undershot would give them, because they had no choice but to beg, steal or starve. Their misery and degradation did not lie at the door of individualism; they lay nowhere but at the door of the State. Adam Smith's economics are not the economics of individualism; they are the economics of landowners and mill-owners. Our zealots of positive intervention would do well to read the history of the Enclosures Acts and the work of the Hammonds, and see what they can make of them." - Albert Jay Nock
"Eventually, hit-and-run pilferage was replaced by the idea of security—or the continuing exaction of tribute from people held in bondage. Sometimes the investing tribe would take charge of a trading center and place levies on transactions, sometimes they would take control of the highways and waterways leading to the villages and collect tolls from caravans and merchants. At any rate, they soon learned that loot is part of production and that it is plentiful when production is plentiful; to encourage production, therefore, they undertook to patrol it and to maintain 'law and order.' They not only policed the conquered people but also protected them from other marauding tribes; in fact, it was not uncommon for a harassed community to invite a warlike tribe to come in and stand guard, for a price." - Frank Chodorov
"The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent. Indeed, that is, and always has been, the whole point of a monopoly; the old and sound argument against a monopoly. It is only because it is incompetent that it has to be omnipotent. When one large shop occupies the whole of one side of a street (or sometimes both sides), it does so in order that men may be unable to get what they want; and may be forced to buy what they don't want." - G.K. Chesterton
"It may be that weary beasts of the forest come around
to accepting the hunter's trap as a necessary concomitant of foraging for food.
At any rate, the presumably rational human animal has become so inured to
political interventions that he cannot think of the making of a living without
them; in all his economic calculations his first consideration is, what is the
law in the matter? Or, more likely, how can I make use of the law to improve my
lot in life? This may be described as a conditioned reflex. It hardly occurs to
us that we might do better operating under our own steam, within the limits put
upon us by nature, and without political restraints, controls, or subventions.
It never enters our minds that these interventionary measures are places in our
path, like the trap, for purposes diametrically opposed to our search for a
better living. We automatically accept them as necessary to that purpose." - Frank Chodorov
"Yet so much out of proportion looms the State in its relations with the individual that the average mind can scarcely conceive it possible that the functions now assumed by the State might be performed for the general good with greater efficiency and less cost by voluntary non-coercive agencies." - William Bailie
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself." - Oscar Wilde
"The talk about abolishing competition is as intelligible to me as if some one talked about abolishing gravity. Even if it were possible, it would not be desirable. Cooperation can do much towards making economies, but it must be voluntary if the highest results are to be attained. This is easy enough to ascertain, if we but compare the compulsory cooperation which governments impose on us and the voluntary societies which surround us on every land." - Joseph Labadie
"Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place." - Friedrich Hayek
"Because you can collect three men on one side, and only two on the other side, that can offer no reason—no shadow of a reason—why the three men should dispose of the lives and property of the two men, should settle for them what they are to do, and what they are to be: that mere rule of numbers can never justify the turning of the two men into slaves, and the three men into slaveowners." - Auberon Herbert
"The glorification of the State as a kind of all-wise providence has neither historic nor logical foundation. The quixotic belief of the Socialists that the State can be captured by the proletariat and used to expropriate the capitalists, then afterwards carry on all the industrial functions of society on collectivist principles, is economically unsound as it is chimerical." - William Bailie
"If laws were not made, and enforced in the interest of theft, if the State were not one great embodiment of speculative piracy, Astor, Vanderbilt and Stewart would have to run for their lives or cease to steal. Since legal sanction makes stealing popular, respectable and possible, the great anti-theft movement, known as Labor Reform, involves the abolition of the State." - Ezra H. Heywood
"We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used." - Friedrich Hayek
"It is said that capital exercises no real tyranny,
because labor is free to accept or reject the terms offered. But, bound by
subtler chains than of old, labor is enslaved and defrauded by conditions and
devices which capital creates and administers. . . . What whips, revolvers, and
blood-hounds were to chattel bondage, usurped control of raw materials and the
means of exchange, whereby want and destitution are produced to order, is to
the profit system. Property does not naturally accumulate, but tends to diffusion
and decay." - Ezra H. Heywood
"In other words, the hygienic prison and the servile factory will become so uncommonly like each other that the poor man will hardly know or care whether he is at the moment expiating an offence or merely swelling a dividend. In both places there will be the same sort of shiny tiles. In neither place will there be any cell so unwholesome as a coal-cellar or so wholesome as a home." - G.K. Chesterton
"I protest that in criticizing property, or rather the whole mass of institutions of which property is the pivot, I have never intended either to attack individual rights, based upon existing laws, or to contest the legitimacy of acquired possessions, or to demand an arbitrary division of goods, or to place any obstacle to the free and regular acquisition, by sale and exchange, of property, of even to forbid or suppress, by sovereign decree, ground rent or interest on capital.
"I think that all these manifestations of human activity should remain free and voluntary for all: I ask for them no modifications, restrictions or suppressions, other than those which result naturally and of necessity from the universalization of the principle of reciprocity which I propose." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"The falsehood resides not in this or that form of the state, but in the state itself, as an idea, as a principle; we must concern ourselves with, not with the good or evil of a particular form of state, but with the state as false in itself." - George Woodcock
"Does man have the right to exist for his own sake—or is he born in bondage, as an indentured servant who must keep buying his life by serving the tribe but can never acquire it free and clear? This is the first question to answer. The rest is consequences and practical implementations. The basic issue is only: Is man free?" - Ayn Rand
"A supply of defense services on the free market would mean maintaining the axiom of the free society, namely, that there be no use of physical force except in defense against those using force to invade person or property. This would imply the complete absence of a State apparatus or government; for the State, unlike all other persons and institutions in society, acquires its revenue, not by exchanges freely contracted, but by a system of unilateral coercion called 'taxation.' Defense in the free society (including such defense services to person and property as police protection and judicial findings) would therefore have to be supplied by people or firms who (a) gained their revenue voluntarily rather than by coercion and (b) did not — as the State does — arrogate to themselves a compulsory monopoly of police or judicial protection. . . . Defense services, like all other services, would be marketable and marketable only." - Murray Rothbard
"[T]he sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision." - Friedrich Hayek
"In the end the Party would announce that two and
two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they
should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded
it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external
reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy." - George Orwell
"A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master, who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the last extremes of injustice and oppression." - Edward Gibbon
"A Russian should rejoice if Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Finland, Armenia, should be separated, freed, from Russia; so with an Englishman in regard to Ireland, India, and other possessions; and each should help to this, because, the greater the state, the more wrong and cruel is its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded. Therefore, if we really wish to be what we profess to be, we must not only cease our present desire for the growth of our state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening, and help this forward with all our might. And in this way we must train the rising generation; we must educate them so that, just as now a young man is ashamed to show his rude egoism by eating everything and leaving nothing for others, by pushing the weak out of the way that he may pass himself, by forcibly taking that which another needs: so he may then be equally ashamed of desiring increased power for his own country; and so that, just as it is now considered stupid, foolish, to praise oneself, it shall then be seen to be equally foolish to praise one's own nation, as it is now done in divers of the best national histories, pictures, monuments, text-books, articles, verses, sermons, and silly national hymns. It must be understood that, as long as we praise patriotism, and cultivate it in the young, so long will there be armaments to destroy the physical and spiritual life of nations; and wars, vast, awful wars, such as we are preparing for, and into the circle of which we are drawing, debauching them in our patriotism, the new and to be dreaded combatants of the far East." - Leo Tolstoy
"Government is as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God. Try it, if you don't believe it. Seek through the legislative halls of America and find, if you can, the Government. In the end you will be doomed to confer with the agent, as before." - Voltairine de Cleyre
"This is supposing the present race of kings in the world to have had an honourable origin; whereas it is more probable, that could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise, that we should find the first of them nothing better than principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtilty obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who by increasing in power, and extending his depredations, over-awed the quiet and defenceless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions." - Thomas Paine
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve." - Henry David Thoreau
"Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is almost a general rule, that where ever we find agreeable manners, there commerce flourishes; and that wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners. . . . Commerce has every where diffused a knowledge of the manners of all nations; these are compared one with another, and from this comparison arise the greatest advantages." - Montesquieu
"Taking this view of the matter, the Anarchists contend that defence is not an essential of the State, but that aggression is. Now what is aggression? Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy. On the other hand, he who resists another's attempt to control is not an aggressor, an invader, a governor, but simply a defender, a protector; and the nature of such resistance is not changed whether it be offered by one man to another man, as when one repels a criminal's onslaught, or by one man to all other men, as when one declines to obey an oppressive law, or by all other men to one man, as when a subject people rises against a despot, or as when the members of a community voluntarily unite to restrain a criminal. This distinction between invasion and resistance, between government and defence, is vital. Without it there can be no valid philosophy of politics. Upon this distinction and other considerations just outlined, the Anarchists frame the desired definitions. This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will. And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principal of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area." - Benjamin Tucker
"Although a righteous, humane, and unselfish purpose actuated all his efforts, [Josiah] Warren knew that self-interest, arising out of the instinct of self-preservation, is the leading motive of human conduct, and wasted no time with reforms which ignored this natural law. He believed that the first step toward doing good to others was to show them that he possessed no power to do them harm, and 'was as ready to run away from power as are most reformers to pursue it.'" - William Bailie
"[L]ibertarians should breed a thorough and uncompromising disrespect for the government and its laws. We should tell people, in no uncertain terms, that decrees of the government have no moral legitimacy whatever - that they are on par with decrees of the mafia. We must work to minimize and demystify the State. Of course, there is the practical problem of avoiding penalties, and individuals may choose to obey particular laws in order to escape punishment. But a government that must rely entirely on fear cannot long survive. All governments must cloak themselves in legitimacy in order to win the passive acquiescence of their subjects. Libertarians must seek to dissolve this aura of legitimacy. We must tell people: you have certain rights, period; and what the government does cannot change that. The government is a thug and a thief; be on your guard, watch it with caution, for it is powerful. But do not be awed by it. Do not grant it respect or moral sanction. Treat it as you would any villain." - George H. Smith
"If only they could be made to understand that Anarchy does not mean a sudden overturning of the existing order of things, a compulsory substitution of chaos for injustice, a whirlwind of mad disorder; if only they would listen long enough to find out that Anarchy means a slow growth of the principles of liberty and justice; the gradual dropping off of the 'thou shalt's' and 'thou shalt not's' of laws and constitutions as men slowly learn that it is better to be governed by reasonable and intelligent conviction from within than compulsion from without . . . ." - Benjamin Tucker
"The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful means that human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from trying to do better. . . . Organization is therefore likely to be beneficial and effective so long as it is voluntary and is imbedded in a free sphere and will either have to adjust itself to circumstances not taken into account in its conception or fail." - Friedrich Hayek
"Refuse then to put your faith in mere machinery, in party organizations, in Acts of Parliament, in great unwieldy systems, which treat good and bad, the careful and the careless, the striving and the indifferent, on the same plan, and which on account of their vast and cumbrous size, their complexity, their official central management, pass entirely out of your control. Refuse to be spoon-fed, drugged and dosed, by the politicians." - Auberon Herbert
"Many of the greatest things man has achieved are the result not of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand. They are greater than any individual precisely because they result from the combination of knowledge more extensive than a single mind can master." - Friedrich Hayek
"As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, than he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying toward its support. It is self-evident that in so behaving he in no way trenches upon the liberty of others; for his position is a passive one; and whilst passive he cannot become an aggressor. It is equally self-evident that he cannot be compelled to continue one of a political corporation, without a breach of the moral law, seeing that citizenship involves payment of taxes; and the taking away of a man’s property against his will, is an infringement of his rights. Government being simply an agent employ in common by a number of individuals to secure to them certain advantages, the very nature of the connection implied that it is for each to say whether he will employ such an agent or not. If any one of them determines to ignore this mutual-safety confederation, nothing can be said except that he loses all claim to its good offices, and exposes himself to the danger of maltreatment—a thing he is quite at liberty to do if he likes. He cannot be coerced into political combination without a breach of the law of equal freedom; he can withdraw from it without committing any such breach; and he has therefore a right so to withdraw." - Herbert Spencer
"How do Socialists propose to cure this evil, as they consider, of big concerns? By making them bigger still—that is, handing them over to Government." - Henry Wilson
"The crimes of history may be briefly summed up in the words, — Abuse of Power. It is a matter of universal experience that power, above all, governmental power, will be eternally abused. Nor can the efforts of the most earnest reformers prevent it." - William Bailie
"The radicalism which so strongly influenced English politics throughout a large part of the last century aimed to reduce the State to a minimum of activity. . . . Radicalism failed because it could not see that political equality, its chosen ideal, was impossible while economic and industrial inequality formed the cornerstone of the social edifice. Liberty in its mouth meant simply the freedom of the proprietary classes, equality before the law for the various forms of revenue." - William Bailie
"Bad government, like good government, is a spiritual thing. Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer. The sight of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense, an enchanting sight: nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As they say in the gushing articles about him in the magazines, he is a fascinating personality. So is a snake. . . . Now, the chief of the fairy tales, by which he gains this glory and glamour, is a certain hazy association he has managed to create between the idea of bigness and the idea of practicality. . . . They are also affected by this queer idolatry of the enormous and elaborate; and cannot help feeling that anything so complicated must go like clockwork." - G.K. Chesterton
"The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people. But if he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgment in things which concern himself, the same reasons which show that opinion should be free, prove also that he should be allowed, without molestation, to carry his opinions into practice at his own cost." - John Stuart Mill
"This absolute right of Sovereignty in every individual, over his or her person, time, and property is the only rule or principle known to this writer that is not subject to exceptions and failures as a regulator of human intercourse." - Josiah Warren
"It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all." - Oscar Wilde
"At the end of life you may close your eyes, saying: 'I have not been dominated by the Dominant Idea of my Age; I have chosen mine own allegiance, and served it. I have proved by a lifetime that there is that in man which saves him from the absolute tyranny of Circumstance, which in the end conquers and remoulds Circumstance,–the immortal fire of Individual Will, which is the salvation of the Future.'" - Voltairine de Cleyre
"To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any. For every one as he is himself, so he hath a self-propriety, else could he not be himself, and on this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man." - Richard Overton
"Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property." - Lysander Spooner
"The question now on the table is which ideal is more feasible: the ideal of a monetary bureaucracy that is mechanically apolitical and selflessly efficiency-minded, or the ideal of a purely private and market-disciplined monetary system." - Lawrence H. White
"Had the American public mind been educated to understand that Individuality is the vital principle of order, it would have generally seen and admitted that Government has, properly, but one (Individual) function, which is to resist or restrain encroachments upon the rights of Individuals. That it is not the true function of governments to prescribe opinions, either moral, religious, or political; to meddle with manufactures or importations; to prescribe the cut of the citizen’s hair, the employment of his time, or the disposal of his life or his property, but simply and solely to protect him against such impertinences." - Josiah Warren
"And what is the remedy for all this? Must we revert to a system of centralisation? Not at all. Quite the reverse. Decentralise down to the unit itself, the individual." - Wordsworth Donisthorpe
"Why should you desire to compel others; why should you seek to have power—that evil, bitter, mocking thing, which has been from of old, as it is today, the sorrow and curse of the world—over your fellow men and fellow women? Why should you desire to take from any man or woman their own will and intelligence, their free choice, their own self-guidance, their inalienable rights over themselves; why should you desire to make of them mere tools and instruments for your own advantage and interest; why should you desire to compel them to serve and follow your opinions instead of their own; why should you deny in them the soul—that suffers so deeply from all constraint—and treat them as a sheet of blank paper upon which you may write your own will and desires, of whatever kind they may happen to be? Who gave you the right, from where do you pretend to have received it, to degrade other men and women from their own true rank as human beings, taking from them their will, their conscience, and intelligence—in a word, all the best and highest part of their nature—turning them into mere empty worthless shells, mere shadows of the true man and woman, mere counters in the game you are mad enough to play; and just because you are more numerous or stronger than they, to treat them as if they belonged not to themselves, but to you? Can you believe that good will ever come by morally and spiritually degrading your fellow men? What happy and safe and permanent form of society can you hope to build on this pitiful plan of subjecting others, or being yourselves subjected by them?" - Auberon Herbert
"Free Thought signifies the unrestricted application of the powers of the intellect to any subject. It means the absence of any threat, or penalty, or impediment to the exercise of thought." - George Jacob Holyoake
"Surely it is worth something to feel that there are no priests, no popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods, to whom your intellect can be compelled to pay a reluctant homage." - Robert G. Ingersoll
"Is the system called Socialism well named? Quite the contrary. It is a system of anti-social conduct; and Individualism contributes just as much to the welfare of society as to that of the individual." - Henry Wilson
"In the present more secular age, the divine right of the State has been supplemented by the invocation of a new god, Science. State rule is now proclaimed as being ultrascientific, as constituting planning by experts." - Murray N. Rothbard
"This character of the fundamental problem has, I am afraid, been obscured rather than illuminated by many of the recent refinements of economic theory, particularly by many of the uses made of mathematics." - Friedrich Hayek
"[T]he binary division between resistance and non-resistance is an unreal one. The existence of those who seem not to rebel is a warren of minute, individual, autonomous tactics and strategies which counter and inflect the visible facts of overall domination, and whose purposes and calculations, desires and choices resist any simple division into the political and the apolitical." - James C. Scott
"All economic activity is in this sense planning; and in any society in which many people collaborate, this planning, whoever does it, will in some measure have to be based on knowledge which, in the first instance, is not given to the planner but to somebody else, which somehow will have to be conveyed to the planner. The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process, and the problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy—or of designing an efficient economic system.
"The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about 'economic planning' centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals." - Friedrich Hayek
"Integration must not be confounded with centralisation, nor must decentralisation be confounded with disruption." - Wordsworth Donisthorpe
"To enact and profess to enforce Federal laws against rich corporations seems infinitely easier to our strenuous statesmen than to go to the root of the matter and cut off the legal privileges which enable the monopolists to extract unjust tribute." - William Bailie
"Every genuine student of natural science is an incipient Anarchist. He must cast aside all imposed authority, rely upon himself, and accept only that which is capable of proof." - William Bailie
"I do not mean to be understood that all are of one mind. On the contrary, in a progressive state there is no demand for conformity. We build on Individuality. Any differences between us confirm our position. Differences, therefore, like the admissible discords in music, are a valuable part of our harmony. It is only when the rights of persons or property are actually invaded that collisions arise. These rights being clearly defined and sanctioned by public opinion, and temptations to encroachments being withdrawn, we may then consider our great problem practically solved." - Josiah Warren
"I hope the distinction between the two cases of using force will be clearly seen. In using force against the aggressor, we use it against the person who has forfeited his own rights in attacking the rights of others; we stand firmly on the primary law, though acting on the secondary law of self-defence which is implied and involved in the first; in the other case, where we use force against the non-aggressor, we depart from our primary law, and act as the Socialist does, putting something of our own invention and manufacture in the place of liberty, though we choose to call it by the same name." - Auberon Herbert
"Is the separateness, the individuality, of human beings an unverifiable assumption? If there is one thing on which we can safely build, it is the great natural fact that each human being forms with his or her body and mind a separate entity—from which we must conclude that the entities belong to themselves and not to each other." - Auberon Herbert
"As long as compulsory taxation lasts . . . liberty will be but a mocking phrase. Between liberty and compulsory taxation there is no possible reconciliation." - Auberon Herbert
"[W]e see that the State is antagonistic to society; and, society being essential to individual life and development, the conclusion leaps to the eyes that the relation of the State to the individual and of the individual to the State must be one of hostility, enduring till the State shall perish." - Benjamin R. Tucker
"In the evolution of political ideas, anarchism can be seen as an ultimate projection of both liberalism and socialism, and the differing strands of anarchist thought can be related to their emphasis on one or the other of these." - Colin Ward
"Is this the genuine state of man? Is this a condition so desirable, that we should be anxious to entail it upon posterity for ever? Is it high treason to enquire whether it may be meliorated? Are we sure, that every change from such a situation of things, is severely to be deprecated? Is it not worth while, to suffer that experiment, which shall consist in a gradual, and almost insensible, abolition of such mischievous institutions?" - William Godwin
"To effectuate the suggested revolution all that is necessary is to stay away from the polls. Unlike other revolutions, it calls for no organization, no violence, no war fund, no leader to sell it out. In the quiet of his conscience each citizen pledges himself, to himself, not to give moral support to an unmoral institution, and on election day he remains at home." - Frank Chodorov
"The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently." - Gustav Landauer
"All forms of government have this in common: each possesses more power than is required by the given conditions; in fact, this excess in the capacity for making dispositions is actually what we understand by political power. The measure of this excess . . . represents the exact difference between administration and government." - Martin Buber
"Free trade, in the widest definition of the term, means only the division of labour, by which the productive powers of the whole earth are brought into mutual co-operation. If this scheme of universal dependence is to be liable to sudden dislocation whenever two governments choose to go to war, it converts a manufacturing industry, such as ours, into a lottery, in which the lives and fortunes of multitudes of men are at stake. I do not comprehend how any British statesman who consults the interests of his country, and understands the revolution which free trade is effecting in the relations of the world, can advocate the maintenance of commercial blockades." - Richard Cobden
"My political philosophy is a form of anarchism. In my experience, most people appear to be convinced that anarchism is obvious nonsense, an idea that can be refuted within 30 seconds with minimal reflection. This was roughly my attitude before I knew anything about the theory. It is also my experience that those who harbor this attitude have no idea what anarchists actually think – how anarchists think society should function or how they respond to the 30-second objections. Anarchists face a catch-22: most people will not give anarchism a serious hearing because they are convinced that the position is crazy; they are convinced that the position is crazy because they do not understand it; and they do not understand it because they will not give it a serious hearing." - Michael Huemer
"It is this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends, the belief that as far as possible his own views ought to govern his actions, that forms the essence of the individualist position." - Friedrich Hayek
"Coordination requires neither uniformity nor bureaucracy." - Colin Ward
"The results were known twenty-five hundred years ago in Greece. Democracy does not work. It can not work, because every man is free. He can not transfer his inalienable life and liberty to anyone or anything outside himself. When he tries to do this, he tries to obey an Authority that does not exist. It makes no difference what he imagines this Authority to be—Ra or Baal or Zeus or Jupiter; Cleopatra or the Mikado; or Economic Necessity or the Will of the Masses or the Voice of The People; the stubborn fact is that there is no Authority, of any kind, that controls individuals. They control themselves." - Rose Wilder Lane
"Today, voting is an American superstition. Hardly anyone ever thinks about it. Americans take it for granted that every human being has a natural right to vote. Of course this is not true. No one has a natural right to vote. Everyone is born with alienable liberty, but nobody is born with an inalienable ballot." - Rose Wilder Lane
"[T]he great object of law and of government has been and is, to establish and protect a violation of that natural right of property they are described in theory as being intended to guarantee." - Thomas Hodgskin
"In the Society of Contract man is born free, and comes into his inheritance with maturity. By this concept all rights belong to the individual. Society consists of individuals in voluntary association. The rights of any person are limited only by the equal rights of another person. In the Society of Status nobody has any rights. The individual is not recognized; a man is defined by his relation to the group, and is presumed to exist only by permission. The system of status is privilege and subjection. By the ultimate logic of the Society of Status, a member of the group who has not committed even a minor offense might be put to death for 'the good of society.'" - Isabel Paterson
"Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is
the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from
one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need
of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker,
that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We
address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never
talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages." - Adam Smith
"We ought to have learnt enough to avoid destroying our civilization by smothering the spontaneous process of the interaction of the individuals by placing its direction in the hands of any authority. But to avoid this we must shed the illusion that we can deliberately create 'the future of mankind', as the characteristic hubris of a socialist sociologist has recently expressed it." - Friedrich Hayek
"This law of nature, being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original." - William Blackstone
"But why do I enumerate facts so well known to all? Simply because, as intimated at the outset, it seems needful to remind everybody what Liberalism was in the past, that they may perceive its unlikeness to the so-called Liberalism of the present. It would be inexcusable to name these various measures for the purpose of pointing out the character common to them, were it not that in our day men have forgotten their common character. They do not remember that, in one or other way, all these truly Liberal changes diminished compulsory co-operation throughout social life and increased voluntary co-operation. They have forgotten that, in one direction or other, they diminished the range of governmental authority, and increased the area within which each citizen may act unchecked. They have lost sight of the truth that in past times Liberalism habitually stood for individual freedom versus State-coercion." - Herbert Spencer
"Nothing can be more idle than the opposition of theory to practice! What is theory, if it be not a knowledge of the laws which connect effects with their causes, or facts with facts? And who can be better acquainted with facts than the theorist who surveys them under all their aspects, and comprehends their relation to each other? And what is practice without theory, but the employment of means without knowing how or why they act?" - Jean Baptiste Say
"All attempts to get rid of governments by violence have hitherto, always and everywhere resulted only in this: that in place of the deposed governments new ones established themselves often more cruel than those they placed." - Leo Tolstoy
"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question." - Thomas Jefferson
"Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers; indeed, can there be a viable political union while these barriers exist? And, if freedom of trade were the universal practice, would a political union be necessary?" - Frank Chodorov
"Whether it is done through taxation on wages or on wages over a certain amount, or through seizure of profits, or through there being a big social pot so that it's not clear what's coming from where and what’s going where, patterned principles of distributive justice involve appropriating the actions of other persons. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve apart from your decisions. This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part-owner of you; it gives them a property right in you. Just as having such partial control and power of decision, by right, over an animal or inanimate object would be to have a property right in it." - Robert Nozick
"The calamities arising from the collection of wealth in the hands of a few capitalists are to be remedied by collecting it in the hands of one great capitalist, who has no conceivable motive to use it better than other capitalists, the all-devouring state." - Thomas Babington Macaulay
"The state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. And coldly it lieth; and this lie creepeth out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.' . . . But the state is a liar in all tongues of good and evil; whatever it saith, it lieth, whatever it hath, it hath stolen. False is everything in it; with stolen teeth it biteth, the biting one. False are even its intestines." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case: that they are all imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Which of us is there who utters his thoughts, in the fearless and explicit manner that true wisdom would prescribe? Who, that is sufficiently critical and severe, does not detect himself every hour in some act of falsehood or equivocation, that example and early habits have planted too deeply to be eradicated? But the question is not, what extraordinary persons can be found, who may shine illustrious exceptions to the prevailing degeneracy of their neighbours. As long as parents and teachers in general shall fall under the established rule, it is clear that politics and modes of government will educate and infect us all. They poison our minds, before we can resist, or so much as suspect their malignity. Like the barbarous directors of the Eastern seraglios, they deprive us of our vitality, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle. So false is the opinion that has too generally prevailed, that politics is an affair with which ordinary men have little concern." - William Godwin
"Equitable commerce is founded on a principle exactly opposite to combination; this principle may be called that of Individuality. It leaves every one in undisturbed possession of his or her natural and proper sovereignty over its own person, time, property and responsibilities; & no one is acquired or expected to surrender any 'portion' of his natural liberty by joining any society whatever; nor to become in any way responsible for the acts or sentiments of any one but himself; nor is there any arrangement by which even the whole body can exercise any government over the person, time property or responsibility of a single individual. Combinations and all the institutions built upon them are the inventions of Man; and consequently, partake of more or less of man's shortsightedness and other imperfections . . . ." - Josiah Warren
"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hard-headed realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners." - Edward Abbey
"Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote-begging or political campaigns, but rather in the development of self thinking individuals." - Lucy Parsons
"The difference lies in the belief, on the one hand, that the closest approximation to equal liberty might be best secured by the rule of the majority in those matters involving united action of any kind (which rule of the majority they thought it possible to secure by a few simple arrangements for election), and, on the other hand, the belief that majority rule is both impossible and undesirable; that any government, no matter what its forms, will be manipulated by a very small minority, as the development of the States and United States governments has strikingly proved; that candidates will loudly profess allegiance to platforms before elections, which as officials in power they will openly disregard, to do as they please; and that even if the majority will could be imposed, it would also be subversive of equal liberty, which may be best secured by leaving to the voluntary association of those interested in the management of matters of common concern, without coercion of the uninterested or the opposed." - Voltairine de Cleyre
"Every believer in Socialism, in Communism, in Anarchism, and in every other ism, who thinks, or who has the faintest idea, that any permanent good can be done in the world by the use of violence should stop and study the passions raised in his own heart by the Chicago executions. He will find there, among other things, and in varying quantities, rage, contempt, a strengthened desire to annihilate the State, as firm a belief as ever in his principles, and a fierce determination to continue in his work." - Florence Finch Kelly
"How could you have a slogan like 'freedom is slavery' when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." - George Orwell
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs)—or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate. If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's Council, Winston and his gang,' it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into 'Theyocracy.' Anyway, the proper study of Man is anything but Man, and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity." - J.R.R. Tolkien
"Ask of Politicians the End for which Laws were originally designed; and they will answer, that the Laws were designed as a Protection for the Poor and Weak against the Oppression of the Rich and Powerful. But surely no Pretence can be so ridiculous; a Man might as well tell me he has taken off my Load, because he has changed the Burthen." - Edmund Burke
"Remember that the proposal to quit voting is basically revolutionary; it amounts to a shifting of power from one group to another, which is the essence of revolution. As soon as the nonvoting movement got up steam the politicians would most assuredly start a counterrevolution. Measures to enforce voting would be instituted; fines would be imposed for violations, and prison sentences would be meted out to repeaters. . . . It is a necessary for political power, no matter how gained, to have the moral support of public approval, and suffrage is the most efficient scheme for registering it . . . ." - Frank Chodorov
"Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends." - Rose Wilder Lane
"It is one thing to persuade, another to command; one thing to press with arguments, another with penalties. This the civil power alone has a right to do; to the other, good-will is authority enough. Every man has commission to admonish, exhort, convince another of error, and by reasoning to draw him into truth: but to give laws, receive obedience, and compel with the sword, belongs to none but the magistrate." - John Locke
"Endless arguing about, or even rigorous voting for 'better' government has not altered and can not alter the fact that it is the nature of government, the state itself, that has shown itself in such a dark light. For it is in the nature of the state and of government as it has developed to do all of the things that it now is doing — regardless of which partisans, which technicians, operate it at any given point." - Karl Hess
"It is remarkable that the Constitution was little trusted or admired by the wisest and most illustrious of its founders, and that its severest and most desponding critics were those whom Americans revere as the fathers of their country." - Lord Acton
"From the day when the first members of councils placed exterior authority higher than interior, that is to say, recognized the decisions of men united in councils as more important and more sacred than reason and conscience; on that day began the lies that caused the loss of millions of human beings and which continue their unhappy work to the present day." - Leo Tolstoy
"Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by the historical environment. It claims that in most human affairs, whether political, economic, military, religious, moral, pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results from coercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy, jails, conscription, states, pre-ordained standardization, excessive planning, etc." - Paul Goodman
"The powers-that-be do not know the meaning of magnanimity, and often they are simply officious and spiteful; as Malatesta used to say, you just try to do your thing and they prevent you, and then you are to blame for the fight that ensues. Worst of all, the earth-destroying actions of power are demented; and as in ancient tragedies and histories we read how arrogant men committed sacrilege and brought down doom on themselves and those associated with them, so I sometimes am superstitiously afraid to belong to the same tribe and walk the same ground as our statesmen. But no. Men have a right to be crazy, stupid, and arrogant. It's out special thing. Our mistake is to arm anybody with collective power. Anarchy is the only safe polity." - Paul Goodman
"I am an anarchist. I suppose you came here,
the most of you, to see what a real live anarchist looked like. I suppose some
of you expected to see me with a bomb in one hand and a flaming torch in the
other, but are disappointed in seeing neither. If such has been your ideas
regarding an anarchist, you deserve to be disappointed. Anarchists are peaceable,
law abiding people. What do anarchists means when they speak of anarchy?
Webster gives the term two definitions—chaos and the state of being without
political rule. We cling to the latter definition. Our enemies hold that we
believe only in the former." - Lucy Parsons
"I [once] thought as many thousands of earnest, sincere people think, that the aggregate power, operating in human society, known as government, could be made an instrument in the hands of the oppressed to alleviate their sufferings. But a closer study of the origin, history and tendency of governments, convinced me that this was a mistake; I came to understand how organized governments used their concentrated power to retard progress by their ever-ready means of silencing the voice of discontent if raised in vigorous protest against the machinations of the scheming few, who always did, always will and always must rule in the councils of nations where majority rule is recognized as the only means of adjusting the affairs of the people. I came to understand that such concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science." - Lucy Parsons
"[T]he first and chief object proposed is to preserve the unconstrained dominion of the law over the minds and bodies of mankind. It may be simplicity in me, but I protest that I see no anxiety to preserve the natural right of property but a great deal to enforce obedience to the legislator. No misery indeed is deemed too high a price to pay for his supremacy, and for the quiet submission of the people. To attain this end many individuals, and even nations, have been extirpated. Perish the people, but let the law live, has ever been the maxim of the masters of mankind." - Thomas Hodgskin
"[Law] is actually made by those who derive from nature no title whatever to any wealth. But as law in fact is only a general name for the will of the law-maker, being, the expression of his desire to have wealth, and retain power and dominion, it is clear that in making laws for the appropriation of property, he will not, consistently with nature, give to every one what he produces. This object always has been, and now is, so to dispose of the annual produce as will best tend to preserve his power." - Thomas Hodgskin
"The antipode of liberty is artificial, arbitrary, pro forma intervention between individuals who are achieving the best results of experimental association. Its concrete express is Authority. Its organized exercise is known as Government. Now, the most lamentable spectacle to-day, next to rampant despotism itself, is the short-sighted reformer attempting to secure greater liberty by advocating the method of more authority, more intervention, more government." - Benjamin Tucker
"Anarchism is a word without meaning, unless it includes the liberty of the individual to control his product or whatever his product has brought him through exchange in a free market—that is, private property. Whoever denies private property is of necessity an Archist." - Benjamin R. Tucker
"Beneath the governmental machinery, in the shadow of political institutions, out of the sight of statesmen and priests, society is producing its own organism, slowly and silently; and constructing a new order, the expression of its vitality and autonomy, and the denial of the old politics, as well as of the old religion." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Traditions, superstitions and customs
soon formed around this organization which was founded in violence and
aggression, and so the State developed." - Francis Dashwood Tandy
"The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes—an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. . . . No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another." - Albert Jay Nock
"The struggle for existence now is due to monopoly: to the legal restriction of natural opportunities. It is an indisputable fact, that there are an abundance of resources to supply a much larger population than now exists on earth. This being the case there is no reason for any struggle between individuals in order to exist." - Henry Addis
"It is true that the affirmation of individual sovereignty is logically precedent to protest against authority as such. But in practice they are inseparable. To protest against the invasion of individual sovereignty is necessarily to affirm individual sovereignty. The Anarchist always carries his base of supplies with him. He cannot fight away from it. The moment he does so he becomes an Archist. This protest contains all the affirmation that there is." - Benjamin R. Tucker
"[T]he idea of anarchy is quite as rational and concrete as any other. What it means is that political functions have been reduced to industrial functions, and that the social order arises from nothing but transactions and exchanges. Each may then say that he is the absolute ruler of himself . . . ." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"War was the savage impulse; commerce is the civilized calculation. It is clear that the more the commercial tendency dominates, the more the warrior tendency becomes weak. . . . War each day becomes a less efficacious means to attain this aim. It does not offer to individuals . . . benefits which equal the results of peaceful work and regular exchange." - Benjamin Constant
"The constitution of the State supposes . . . a condition which necessitates, between the weak and the strong, the intervention of a coercive power to put an end to their struggles by universal oppression. We maintain that, in this respect, the mission of the State is ended; that, by the division of labor, industrial solidarity, the desire for well-being, and the equal distribution of capital and taxation, liberty and justice obtain surer guarantees than any that ever were afforded them by religion and the State." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
