|
|
 |
Chuang Tzu (also: Zhuangzi) (4th century BCE)
Chinese philosopher who, according to Rothbard, was the first Anarchist.
[The world] does not need governing; in fact it should not be governed.
Those who would have good government without its correlative misrule... do not understand the principles of the universe.
Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.
Étienne de La Boétie (1530-1563)
Judge and writer, author of the Discours de la Servitude Volontaire (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude), which inspired the Anarchist movements that would come centuries after him.
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.
Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.
Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
If in distributing her gifts nature has favored some more than others with respect to body or spirit, she has nevertheless not planned to place us within this world as if it were a field of battle, and has not endowed the stronger or the cleverer in order that they may act like armed brigands in a forest and attack the weaker. One should rather conclude that in distributing larger shares to some and smaller shares to others, nature has intended to give occasion for brotherly love to become manifest, some of us having the strength to give help to others who are in need of it. Hence, since this kind mother has given us the whole world as a dwelling place, has lodged us in the same house, has fashioned us according to the same model so that in beholding one another we might almost recognize ourselves; since she has bestowed upon us all the great gift of voice and speech for fraternal relationship, thus achieving by the common and mutual statement of our thoughts a communion of our wills; and since she has tried in every way to narrow and tighten the bond of our union and kinship... Accordingly it should not enter the mind of anyone that nature has placed some of us in slavery, since she has actually created us all in one likeness.
Men are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings. Similarly men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way.
Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.
It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they are born... the powerful influence of custom is in no respect more compelling than in this, namely, habituation to subjection.
[People will] grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way.
However, there is satisfaction in examining what they get out of all this torment, what advantage they derive from all the trouble of their wretched existence. Actually the people never blame the tyrant for the evils they suffer, but they do place responsibility on those who influence him; peoples, nations, all compete with one another, even the peasants, even the tillers of the soil, in mentioning the names of the favorites, in analyzing their vices, and heaping upon them a thousand insults, a thousand obscenities, a thousand maledictions.
François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire (1694-1778)
Famous writer, anti-religion and proponent of civil liberties.
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.
All men are equal; it is not their birth, but virtue itself that makes the difference.
[T]o wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.
Virtue supposes liberty, as the carrying of a burden supposes active force. Under coercion there is no virtue...
Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
Man is free at the instant he wants to be.
Josiah Warren (1798-1874)
Individualist Anarchist. Considered the first Anarchist in American history. Edited the first Anarchist journal ever published, The Peaceful Revolutionist. Founded many Anarchist communities in the free pre-War of Northern Aggression atmosphere.
Laws and governments defeat their object. Their professed object is the security and good order of society. But... [s]trife for the attainment of this power, has in all ages up to the present hour produced more confusion, destruction of life and property, and more crimes and intense misery than all other causes put together. I venture the assertion that the establishing of such powers has been the greatest error of mankind, and that society never will enjoy peace or security until it has done with these barbarisms and acknowledges the inalienable right of every individual to the sovereignty of their own person, time, and property.
The true basis for society... is freedom to differ in all things, or the sovereignty of every individual.
There can be no FREE state or Nation, where every Individual lives UNDER, instead of ABOVE, the customs, laws, and institutions of the state or Nation!
[U]nder the plausible pretext of securing person and property, they have spread wholesale destruction, famine, and wretchedness, in every frightful form over all parts of the earth, where peace and security might otherwise have prevailed. They have shed more blood, committed more murders, tortures, and other frightful crimes in the struggles against each other for the privilege of governing, than society ever would or could have suffered in the total absence of all governments whatever!
Rulers claim a right to rise above and control the individual, his labor, his trade, his time, and his property, against his own judgment and inclination, while security of person and property cannot consist in anything less than having the supreme government of himself and all his own interests; therefore, security cannot exist under any government whatever.
Max Stirner (1806-1856)
Real name: Johann Kaspar Schmidt. Grandfather of Individualist Anarchism. Known for his book "The Ego and His Own."
The State and I are enemies, I, the egoist have not at heart the welfare of this 'human society', I sacrifice nothing to it, I only utilize it.
The State's behavior is violence, and it calls its violence "law"; that of the individual, "crime."
If submissiveness ceased, it would be all over with lordship.
Away then with every concern that is not altogether my concern. You think at least the 'good cause' must be my concern? What's good, what's bad? Why I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)
One of the first Mutualist thinkers, the first self-professed Anarchist in modern Western history.
Freedom is the mother, not the daughter, of order.
To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State.
Liberty then, nothing more, nothing less. Laissez faire, laissez passer, in the broadest and most literal sense; consequently property, as it rises legitimately from this freedom, is my principle.
Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of the government.
All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.
The great are only great because we are on our knees.
Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.
The essence of the state is its legal monopoly of force. But force is subhuman; in words I quote incessantly, Simone Weil defined it as "that which turns a person into a thing -- either corpse or slave." It may sometimes be a necessary evil, in self-defense or defense of the innocent, but nobody can have by right what the state claims: an exclusive privilege of using it.
I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else. That is the alpha and omega of my argument.
The social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes through a political revolution.
There is a corollary to this principle that property is the only power that can act as a counterweight to the State, because it shows no reverence for princes, rebels against society and is, in short, anarchist. The corollary is that property, an absolutism within an absolutism, is also an element of division within the State. State power is the kind of power that absorbs everything else into it. If it is allowed to take its own way, all individuality will quickly disappear, swallowed up by the collectivity, and society will sink into communism. Property, on the contrary, is a decentralising force. Being itself an absolute, it is anti despotic and anti-unitary.
One word identifies and wards off all errors: what could be easier than to say what is or is not liberty? Liberty then, nothing more, nothing less. Laissez faire, laissez passer, in the broadest and most literal sense; consequently property, as it rises legitimately from this freedom, is my principle.
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
[W]e must understand that outside the sphere of parliamentarism, as sterile as it is absorbing, there is another field incomparably vaster, in which our destiny is worked out; that beyond these political phantoms, whose forms capture our imagination, there are the phenomena of social economy, which, by their harmony or discord, produce all the good and ill of society. … Know well that there is nothing more counter-revolutionary than the Government. Whatever liberalism it pretends, whatever name it assumes, the Revolution repudiates it: its fate is to be absorbed in the industrial organization.
You talk of simplification. But if you can simplify in one point, you can simplify in all. Instead of a million laws, a single law will suffice. What shall this law be? Do not to others what you would not they should do to you: do to others as you would they should do to you. That is the law and the prophets.
But it is evident that this is not a law; it is the elementary formula of justice, the rule of all transactions. Legislative simplification then leads us to the idea of contract, and consequently to the denial of authority. In fact, if there is but a single law, if it solves all the contradictions of society, if it is admitted and acceptedby everybody, it is sufficient for the social contract. In promulgating it you announce the end of government. What prevents you then from making this simplification at once?
Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876)
Anarcho-communist, famed opponent of the ultra-statist Karl Marx, one of the intellectual founding fathers of Anarchism.
The State is the negation of Humanity. It is this in two ways: the opposite of human freedom and human justice (internally), as well as the forcible disruption of the common solidarity of mankind (externally). The Universal State, repeatedly attempted, has always proved an impossibility, so that as long as the State exists, States will exist and since every State regards itself as absolute, and proclaims the adoration of its power as the highest law, to which all other laws must be subordinated, it therefore follows that as long as States exist wars cannot cease. Every State must conquer, or be conquered. Every State must build its power on the weakness or, if it can do it without danger to itself, on the destruction, of other States.
To strive for international justice, liberty, and perpetual peace, and at the same time to uphold the State, is contradictory and naive.
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognised them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
Being free for man means being acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man, and by all the men around him. Liberty is therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection...I myself am human and free only to the extent that I acknowledge the humanity and liberty of all my fellows... I am properly free when all the men and women about me are equally free. Far from being a limitation or a denial of my liberty, the liberty of another is its necessary condition and confirmation.
Every state power, every government, by its very nature places itself outside and over the people and inevitably subordinates them to an organization and to aims which are foreign to and opposed to the real needs and aspirations of the people. We declare ourselves the enemies of every government and every state power, and of governmental organization in general. We think that people can be free and happy only when organized from the bottom up in completely free and independent associations, without governmental paternalism though not without the influence of a variety of free individuals and parties.
If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.
Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.
If there be a human being who is freer than I, then I shall necessarily become his slave. If I am freer than any other, then he will become my slave. Therefore equality is an absolutely necessary condition of freedom.
Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.
If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself.
[The Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship -- their dictatorship, of course -- can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.
It clearly follows that to make men moral it is necessary to make their social environment moral. And that can be done in only one way; by assuring the triumph of justice, that is, the complete liberty of everyone in the most perfect equality for all.
I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow ; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest ; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each — an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person ; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being — they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."
Freedom is the absolute right of every adult man and woman to seek no other sanction for their acts than their own conscience and their own reason, being responsible first to themselves and then to the society which they have voluntarily accepted.
Man is really free to the extent that his freedom, fully acknowledged and mirrored by the free consent of his fellowmen, finds confirmation and expansion in their liberty. Man is truly free only among equally free men; the slavery of even one human being violates humanity and negates the freedom of all.
[I]f we would not fall back into the liberticidal fiction of the public welfare represented by the State, a fiction always founded on the systematic sacrifice of the people, we must clearly recognize that collective liberty and prosperity exist only so far as they represent the sum of individual liberties and prosperities.
From the origin of historic society down to the present day there has been always and everywhere exploitation of the compulsory labour of the masses- slaves, serfs, or wage workers- by some dominant minority; oppression of the people by the Church and by the State.
A boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me.
I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.
[T]here is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.
Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912)
Economist, widely recognized as the first Market Anarchist in modern Western history.
The monopoly of government is no better than any other. One does not govern well and, especially not cheaply, when one has no competition to fear, when the ruled are deprived of the right of freely choosing their rulers. Grant a grocer the exclusive right to supply a neighborhood, prevent the inhabitants of this neighborhood from buying any goods from other grocers in the vicinity, or even from supplying their own groceries, and you will see what detestable rubbish the privileged grocer will end up selling and at what prices! You will see how he will grow rich at the expense of the unfortunate consumers, what royal pomp tle will display for the greater glory of the neighborhood. Well! What is true for the lowliest services is no less true for the loftiest. The monopoly of government is worth no more than that of a grocer's shop. The production of security inevitably becomes costly and bad when it is organized as a monopoly. It is in the monopoly of security that lies the principal cause of wars which have laid waste humanity.
Under the rule of free competition, war between the producers of security entirely loses its justification. Why would they make war? To conquer consumers? But the consumers would not allow themselves to be conquered. They would be careful not to allow themselves to be protected by men who would unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals. If some audacious conqueror tried to become dictator, they would immediately call to their aid all the free consumers menaced by this aggression, and they would treat him as he deserved. Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.
Anselme Bellegarrigue (1820-?)
Early Market Anarchist, writer of the first Anarchist Manifesto.
Indeed:
Who says anarchy, says negation of government;
Who says negation of government says affirmation of the people;
Who says affirmation of the people, says individual liberty;
Who says individual liberty, says sovereignty of each;
Who says sovereignty of each, says equality;
Who says equality, says solidarity or fraternity;
Who says fraternity, says social order.
By contrast:
Who says government, says negation of the people;
Who says negation of the people, says affirmation of political authority;
Who says affirmation of political authority, says individual dependency;
Who says individual dependency, says class supremacy;
Who says class supremacy, says inequality;
Who says inequality, says antagonism;
Who says antagonism, says civil war;
From which it follows that who says government, says civil war.
Yes, anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war.
"Vous avez cru jusqu’à ce jour qu’il y avait des tyrans ? Et bien ! vous vous êtes trompés, il n’y a que des esclaves : là où nul n’obéit, personne ne commande."
TRANSLATION: You believed until now that tyrants exist? Well! You were wrong, there are only slaves: where no one obeys, no one can command.
Leo Tolstoy, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Founder of Christian Anarchism. Amongst the greatest novelists in history, he was also a philosopher.
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, and conscience, and a slavish enthralment to those in power. And as such it is recommended wherever it is preached... Patriotism is slavery.
How can we speak of the reasonableness of men who promise in advance to accomplish everything, including murder, that the government - that is, certain men who have attained a certain position - may command? Men who can accept such obligations, and resignedly subordinate themselves to anything that may be prescribed by persons unknown to them in Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, cannot be considered reasonable; and the government, that is, those who are in possession of such power, can still less be considered reasonable, and cannot but misuse it, and become dazed by such insane and dreadful power.
[P]eace between nations cannot be attained by reasonable means, by conversations, by arbitration, as long as the subordination of the people to the government continues, a condition always unreasonable and always pernicious.
The misapprehension springs from the fact that the learned jurists, deceiving themselves as well as others, depict in their books an ideal of government -- not as it really is, an assembly of men who oppress their fellow-citizens, but in accordance with the scientific postulate, as a body of men who act as the representatives of the rest of the nation. They have gone on repeating this to others so long that they have ended by believing it themselves, and they really seem to think that justice is one of the duties of governments. History, however, shows us that governments, as seen from the reign of Caesar to those of the two Napoleons and Prince Bismarck, are in their very essence a violation of justice; a man or a body of men having at command an army of trained soldiers, deluded creatures who are ready for any violence, and through whose agency they govern the State, will have no keen sense of the obligation of justice. Therefore governments will never consent to diminish the number of those well-trained and submissive servants, who constitute their power and influence.
Governments need armies to protect them against their enslaved and oppressed subjects.
...obsolete religious justification of violence which consisted in the recognition of the supernatural personality of the God-ordained ruler ("there is no power but of God") has been superseded by the "scientific" justification which puts forward, first, the assertion that because the coercion of man by man has existed in all ages, it follows that such coercion must continue to exist. ...what "science" calls "the historic law". A further "scientific" justification lies in the statement that as among plants and wild beasts there is a constant struggle for existence which always results in the survival of the fittest, a similar struggle should be carried on among human beings... The third... justification is, ...that in public life the suppression of some for the protection of the majority cannot be avoided - so that coercion is unavoidable... this justification by pseudo-science consists in the fact that, ..."Science" says that these decisions represent the will of the people...
What does it mean that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves?
As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence-as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual. Do not resist the evil- doer and take no part in doing so, either in the violent deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will be able to enslave you.
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
Today, nobody sees, or wishes to see, that in our time the enslavement of the majority of men is based on money taxes, levied on land and otherwise, which are collected by government from the subjects.
In spite of the unceasing efforts made by men in power to conceal this and to ascribe a different meaning to power, power is the application of a rope, a chain by which a person will be bound and dragged along, or of a whip, with which he will be flogged, or of a knife, or an ax with which they will cut off his hands, feet, ears, head—an application of these means or the threat they will be used. Thus it was in the time of Nero and of Ghenghis Khan and thus it is even now, in the most liberal of governments.
John Dalberg-Acton, First Baron of Acton (1834-1902)
Aristocrat and historian.
Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.
The man who prefers his country before any other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
Auberon Herbert (1838-1906)
Founder of Voluntaryism. Writer, philosopher, member of Parliament. Editor of the Voluntaryist journal The Free Life.
And what sort of philosophical doctrine is this -- that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others... How, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed... It is not possible to suppose, without absurdity, than a man should have no rights over his own body and mind, and yet have a 1/10,000,000th share in unlimited rights over all other bodies and minds?
If government half a century ago had provided us with all our dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators today to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves.
... every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive.
True liberty cannot exist apart from the full rights of property, for property is the only crystallized form of free faculties.
Politics must be the battle of the principles... the principle of liberty against the principle of force.
Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921)
Foremost Anarchist and the first famous advocate of Anarcho-Communism.
In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it.
"Law and Authority"
ANARCHISM, the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions.
"Anarchism" entry, from The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910. Written by Peter Kropotkin.
Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development is… death!
Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centres on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Famous existentialist philosopher.
But the state lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies; and whatever it has it has stolen.
Everything in it is false; it bites with stolen teeth, and bites often. It is false down to its bowels.
Confusion of tongues of good and evil; this sign I give you as the sign of the state. This sign points to the will to death! it points to the preachers of death!
Insanity in individuals is something rare - in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
And again there are those who regard it as virtue to say:
"Virtue is necessary";
but, after all is said and done, they believe only that policemen are necessary.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
The state, I call it, where all drink poison, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all -- is called "life."
Behold the superfluous! They steal the works of the creators and the treasures of the wise. Education, they call their theft -- and everything becomes sickness and trouble to them!
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."
It is a lie! It was creators who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
Destroyers are they who lay snares for the many, and call it state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.
Errico Malatesta (1853-1932)
Anarcho-Communist revolutionary and writer.
In the anarchist milieu, communism, individualism, collectivism, mutualism and all the intermediate and eclectic programmes are simply the ways considered best for achieving freedom and solidarity in economic life; the ways believed to correspond more closely with justice and freedom for the distribution of the means of production and the products of labour among men.
For us, it is necessary and sufficient that everyone have complete freedom, and nobody can monopolize the means of production and live on someone else’s work.
The basic function of government everywhere in all times, whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organisation may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses [and] of defending the oppressors and exploiters: and its principal, characteristic and indispensable instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and gaoler--to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest or schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke.
And by anarchist spirit I mean that deeply human sentiment, which aims at the good of all, freedom and justice for all, solidarity and love among the people; which is not an exclusive characteristic only of self-declared anarchists, but inspires all people who have a generous heart and an open mind...
For anarchy to succeed or simply to advance towards its success it must be conceived not only as a lighthouse which illuminates and attracts, but as something possible and attainable, not in centuries to come, but in a relatively short time and without relying on miracles...
We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.
Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943)
Sociologist and ecoomist, wrote an extensive historical study of the State's origins and history in "The State."
The State, completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first stages of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors.
No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner. [1] Wherever a reliable tradition reports otherwise, either it concerns the amalgamation of two fully developed primitive states into one body of more complete organisation; or else it is an adaptation to men of the fable of the sheep which made a bear their king in order to be protected against the wolf. But even in this latter case, the form and content of the State became precisely the same as in those states where nothing intervened, and which became immediately 'wolf states'.
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one's own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. Robbery! Forcible appropriation! These words convey to us ideas of crime and the penitentiary, since we are the contemporaries of a developed civilization, specifically based on the inviolability of property. And this tang is not lost when we are convinced that land and sea robbery is the primitive relation of life, just as the warrior's trade - which also for a long time is only organized mass robbery constitutes the most respected of occupations. Both because of this, and also on account of the need of having, in the further development of this study, terse, clear, sharply opposing terms for these very important contrasts, I propose i. the following discussion to call one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means" for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the "political means."
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912)
Emma Goldman called her "the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced."
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.
And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be "a necessary evil," and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck.
A standing army is a standing menace to liberty.
Humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal. And unless there is equality (and by equality I mean equal chances for every one to make the most of himself) unless, I say, these equal chances exist, freedom, either of thought, speech, or action, is equally a mockery.
Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck. Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
My personal conviction is that both forms of society, as well as many intermediations, would, in the absence of government, be tried in various localities, according to the instincts and material condition of the people, but that well founded objections may be offered to both. Liberty and experiment alone can determine the best forms of society. Therefore I no longer label myself otherwise than as "Anarchist" simply.
Emma Goldman (1869-1940)
Famous Anarchist activist who introduced gender politics in the movement.
Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination.
Anarchism, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government.
Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.
"All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.
ANARCHISM:--The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.
Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism…. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.
Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith?
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution. (NOTE: this is actually a popular paraphrase of a longer story)
I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.
John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,--a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence.
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.
The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition.
Of all social theories Anarchism alone steadfastly proclaims that society exists for man, not man for society. The sole legitimate purpose of society is to serve the needs and advance the aspiration of the individual. Only by doing so can it justify its existence and be an aid to progress and culture.
Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945)
Market Anarchist author and theorist.
Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.
The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime.... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants.
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation.
Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you.
[T]he State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation -- that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class -- that is, for a criminal purpose. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient.
Many now believe that with the rise of the totalitarian State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will.
Democratic State practice is nothing more or less than State practice. It does not differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State practice, or any other. Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: you get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Famous social critic, satirist and commentator.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
Big Business was in favor of Prohibition, believing that a sober workman would make a better slave than one with a few drinks in him. It was in favor of all the gross robberies and extortions that went on during the war, and profited by all of them. It was in favor of all the crude throttling of free speech that was then undertaken in the name of patriotism, and is still in favor of it.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it.
Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940)
Most decorated Marine in US history, retired as General, exposed a corporate plot to overthrow the US government. Expressed strong anti-war and anti-war racket views after his retirement.
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.
Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.
We must take the profit out of war.
We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.
Who provides the [war] profits – these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them – in taxation.
The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.
Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)
Libertarian economist and philosopher, major contributor to the Austrian School, wrote extensively about spontaneous order.
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.
Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value. We are neither entitled to be unselfish at someone else's expense nor is there any merit in being unselfish if we have no choice. The members of a society who in all respects are made to do the good thing have no title to praise.
Who can seriously doubt that the power which a millionaire, who may be my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest bureaucrat possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends how I am allowed to live and work?
A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.
A spontaneous order is a system which has developed not through the central direction or patronage of one or a few individuals but through the unintended consequences of the decisions of myriad individuals each pursuing their own interests through voluntary exchange, cooperation, and trial and error.
This process of spontaneous evolution is not restricted to explaining the growth of the economic order but can also account for the development of language, money, culture, law, social conventions and even morals and ethics. Although the spontaneous order develops through individuals pursuing their own interest, the individuals still behave by following commonly held rules rather than by acting in a random fashion, and these rules are themselves the product of evolution.
The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule... Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, deception and spying, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual are essential and unavoidable Acts which revolt all our feelings, such as the shooting of hostages or the killing of the old or sick, are treated as mere matters of expediency; the compulsory uprooting and transportation of hundreds of thousands becomes an instrument of policy approved by almost everybody except the victims.
'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987)
Philosopher and economist.
The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.
No absolute monarch ever had at his disposal a police force comparable to those of modern democracies.
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Founded the philosophy of Objectivism which, while in enmity with Anarchy, promotes individualism and self-determinism.
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws.
You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you're incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others-that you're unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to be an omnipotent ruler-that you're unable to earn your own living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other.
A gun is not an argument.
Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.
There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.
Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
One of the most popular authors of hard science-fiction. His novels had strong Anarchist themes.
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.
At one time kings were anointed by Deity, so the problem was to see to it that Deity chose the right candidate. In this age the myth is 'the will of the people' ... but the problem changes only superficially.
A managed democracy is a wonderful thing... for the managers... and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible'."
The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
Robert LeFevre (1911-1986)
Libertarian anarchist (called himself "autarchist") and pacifist. Founded the Freedom School, and was very influential on the libertarian movement.
Governments, by their nature, are invariably agencies of aggression. This is our excuse for having them; they can be employed against the "other fellow" to compel him to provide the money for our schemes, to compel him to do or not to do in accordance with our wishes.
But to the degree that we rely on government, which is our agency of aggression, to this degree do we reject civilization. If we can learn to recognize the merit of non-aggression, and hence of voluntary action, we will begin to employ the market place to a fuller degree and ultimately we may be able to abandon government reliance totally.
In spite of the arguments of fear, it is always wrong to steal and legal justification does not make right that which is morally wrong.
If there is one lesson which the times cry out for us to learn, it is this: Stop trusting government.
Government, when it is examined, turns out to be nothing more nor less than a group of fallible men with the political force to act as though they were infallible. Remove the political force and these same men would be as ordinary and as reasonable as any of us. And in order for us to take time for the truth we are going to have to someway help to create the kind of climate in which government cannot and will not keep rushing us frantically into the next round of folly. Reason and political force are deadly enemies.
The only conceivable merit relating to majority rule lies in the fact that if we obtain monopoly decisions by this process, we will coerce fewer persons than if we permit the minority to coerce the majority. But implicit in all political voting is the necessity to coerce some so that all are controlled.
There is only one truly moral position for an honest person to take. He must refrain from coercing his fellows. This means that he should refuse to participate in the process by means of which some men obtain power over others. If you value your right to life, liberty, and property, then clearly there is every reason to refrain from participating in a process that is calculated to remove the life, liberty, or property from any other person.
Karl Hess (1923-1994)
Had a career as a Republican speechwriter before he became a theorist for Anarcho-Capitalism.
Libertarianism is a people's movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people, may voluntarily associate, disassociate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncracies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.
[A]narchism [is] the total opposition to any institutionalized power, a state of completely voluntary social organization in which people would establish their ways of life in small, consenting groups, and cooperate with others as they see fit.
Vietnam should remind conservatives that whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.
Malcolm X (1925-1965)
Race activist and promoter of Islam: his political stance is unknown.
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation.
When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.
You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.
Anthony de Jasay (1925-)
Non-Anarchist libertarian philosopher and economist.
People who live in states have as a rule never experienced the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical possibility of moving from the one to the other.
[P]references for political arrangements of society are to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that political institutions are either addictive like some drugs, or allergy-inducing like some others, or both, for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others.
All theories of the benign state, from divine right to social contract, carry the tacit assumption that the satisfaction or happiness of the state is for some reason and in some manner attained through the happiness of its subjects. No good reason is offered for this, nor a plausible manner in which it could take place. Therefore, there is no warrant for this rather demanding assumption, least of all when it is made tacitly. Rational action by the state links its power to its ends in a natural short-circuit, without passing along the long and winding loop which is, so to speak, the locus of the subjects' own conception of their good.
[S]ubjects need only believe that their ends are no different from the ends the state is in fact furthering... Such a result is promoted by the state's ability (and in particular by the role it assumes in public education) to render society relatively homogeneous.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Philosopher, sociologist and historian critic of modernity.
Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, and hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
Noam Chomsky (1928-)
Anarcho-syndicalist, world-famous linguist, critic of mainstream media's place in the statist process.
Anarchism, in my view, is an expression of the idea that the burden of proof is always on those who argue that authority and domination are necessary. They have to demonstrate, with powerful argument, that that conclusion is correct. If they cannot, then the institutions they defend should be considered illegitimate.
In my opinion, every form of authority and domination and hierarchy, every authoritarian structure has to justify itself. It has no prior justification. It has to prove that it's justified.
In a totalitarian state, it doesn't matter what people think, since the government can control people by force using a bludgeon. But when you can't control people by force, you have to control what people think, and the standard way to do this is via propaganda (manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusions), marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy of some fashion.
It's the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector.
If you want to understand how a particular society works, you have to understand who makes the decisions that determine the way a society functions. In the U.S., the major decisions over what happens in a society (investment, production, distribution, etc.) are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations, conglomerates, and investment firms. They're also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government, and they're the ones who own the media, and are the ones who are in the position to make decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens, what's done in this society.
[W]hat the media are doing is ensuring that we do not act on our responsibilities, and that the interests of power are served, not the interests of suffering people and not the needs of the American people who would be horrified if they realized the blood that's dripping from their hands because of the way they're allowing themselves to be deluded and manipulated by the system.
As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and by now, that means the global community.
[T]he constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period, delivering power to a better sort of people and excluding those who were not rich, well born, or prominent from exercising political power.
It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
Pivotal leader of the American civil rights movement. While he was anti-Anarchist, he had a lot of goos things to say about revolution against the system.
Cowardice asks the question, Is it safe?
Expediency asks the question, Is it politic?
Vanity asks the question, Is it popular?
But conscience asks the question, Is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him that it is right.
In struggling for human dignity the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.
I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.”
Ron Paul (1935-)
Non-Anarchist libertarian politician, candidate for president in 2008.
We get our rights from our creator as individuals. So every individual should be treated the same way.
Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference.
All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals.
Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.
The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.
War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.
When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.
Failure of government programs prompts more determined efforts, while the loss of liberty is ignored or rationalized away. Whether it’s the war against poverty, drugs, terrorism, or the current Hitler of the day, an appeal to patriotism is used to convince the people that a little sacrifice of liberty, here and there, is a small price to pay. The results, though, are frightening and will soon become even more so.
We need to understand that the more government spends, the more freedom is lost. Instead of simply debating spending levels, we ought to be debating whether the departments, agencies, and programs funded by the budget should exist at all.
No matter how well intentioned, an authoritarian government always abuses its powers.
How can a policy of steadily debasing our currency be defended morally, knowing what harm it causes to those who still believe in saving money and assuming responsibility for themselves in their retirement years?
[I]t is with the complicity of Congress that we have become a nation of pre-emptive war, secret military tribunals, torture, rejection of habeas corpus, warrantless searches, undue government secrecy, extraordinary renditions, and uncontrolled spying on the American people.
[I]nflation finances war.
[W]e ought to be asking ourselves why corporations and interests groups are willing to give politicians millions of dollars in the first place. Obviously their motives are not altruistic. Simply put, they do it because the stakes are so high. They know government controls virtually every aspect of our economy and our lives, and that they must influence government to protect their interests.
Floyd Harper (?-?)
Non-Anarchist libertarian, founder of the Institute for Humane Studies.
Probably no other belief is now so much a threat to liberty in the United States and in much of the rest of the world as the one that democracy, by itself alone, guarantees liberty.
Liberty... specifies the right to do what [one] desires, rather than the obligation to bow to the force of others in doing what they desire him to do; otherwise slavery becomes ‘liberty,’ and true liberty is lost.
’Power,’ which replaces liberty, is the irrevocable authority over others…The means by which power is acquired, whether by the ‘democratic’ process or by conquest, does not change its status as power.
Liberty does not mean the right to do anything that is the product of a democratic form of government. The right to vote, which is the sovereignty feature of democracy, assures only the liberty to participate in that process. It does not assure that everything done by that process shall automatically be in the interests of liberty. A populace may commit both political and economic suicide under a democracy.
Anyone who will defend his liberty must guard against the argument that access to the ballot, ‘by which people get whatever they want,’ is liberty. It would be as logical to assert that liberty in the choice of a wife is assured to a person if he will put it to the vote of the community and accept their plurality decision, or that liberty in religion is assured if the state enforces participation in the one religion that receives the most votes in the nation.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (1944-)
Paleo-Anarchist. Founder and president of the Mises Institute, publisher of the Journal of Libertarian Studies.
Truly there is an actual conflict at the root of history but it is not the one most people understand or see. It is the great struggle between freedom and despotism, between the individual and the state, between the voluntary means and coercion.
Hayek himself traced the liberal tradition from Cicero, through the Middle Ages, to John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The thread that connects all their thought is the idea that society is more capable than government elites in shaping a prosperous order.
The state is the least essential of any institution in society. It has the same relationship to society that a parasite does to its host.
The essence of government is the right to obey a different set of laws from that which prevails in the rest of society. What we call the rule of law is really the rule of two laws: one for the state and one for everyone else. Theft is illegal but taxation is not. Kidnapping is illegal but stop-loss orders are not. Counterfeiting is illegal but inflating the money supply is not. Lying about its budget is all in a day's work for the government, but the business that does that is shut down.
Government planning not only fails; it tends to produce outcomes that are the opposite of what its proponents say that they favor. The only stable and productive social system is one that embraces human liberty in its totality, and defends the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive.
Why the hysteria against deflation? We are faced with a real puzzle here. In the whole of the private sector, the number one focus of retailers these days, particularly those dominant retailers such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot, is low prices. This they emphasize above all else because they know that this is what consumers want. And yet in the public sector, we find exactly the opposite: an ironclad promise that prices will not be low but rather will be continually rising.
Roughing people up through violence and threats of violence. That's what every line of every regulation comes down to. That's the meaning of every tax. That's the whole upshot of every tariff, expenditure, prohibition, and bomb. It all amounts to increased use of violence in society. Strip away the banners, songs, uniforms, and speeches: that's all that the state really is.
The state is not the foundation of society, it is not the source of our security, it does not bring about prosperity, and it does not protect us. Government instead stands outside of society and lives off its proceeds, and does so for its own benefit and not that of society. If people have liberty, property, and law; they have the basis for what it takes to make a civilization. Anything that compromises those institutions is a force for de-civilization.
Iraq has shown the world that power has limits. No government can rule by force of arms alone. No policy can be imposed on a country whose citizens are opposed to the policy. In the end, governments are nothing but small, well-armed minorities attempting to impose its will on everyone else. They can be held at bay and even overthrown if the people resist.
To understand the world being recreated before us, we must constantly keep this principle in our mind: trade based on ownership is always and everywhere mutually beneficial. Within the institution of trade--whether on the most local level or the global level--we find the key to peace, prosperity, and human flourishing.
Liberty rooted in private property is the highest political virtue, and its enemy is the consolidated State.
What is considered theft in the private sector is "taxation" when done by the state. What is kidnapping in the private sector is "selective service" in the public sector. What is counterfeiting when done in the private sector is "monetary policy" when done by the public sector. What is mass murder in the private sector is "foreign policy" in the public sector.
There is a certain truth to the idea that all governments everywhere are unstable, and the more ambitious they are the more unstable they become. That they work so hard to create a rationale for their rule underscores the point: without it, they can collapse in an instant.
A time for liberty will come when we realize that history is nothing more than the working out of what we think and believe. By choosing to pursue education as the means to revolution, you have seized on the most workable means to save civilization itself.
What most Americans refuse to face is that what the government does day to day, and in particular its military arm, is not an extension of the way the rest of us live. Government knows only one mode of operation: coercion. It does not cooperate; it coerces. Because it is constantly overriding human choices, it makes unrelenting error, most often producing consequences opposite of the stated intention. This is no less true in its foreign operations than it is in its domestic ones.
David D. Friedman (1945-)
Writer and economist, leading figure of the Market Anarchist movement. Author of the introductory text The Machinery of Freedom.
The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.
Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society.
Joseph Sobran (1946-)
Paleo-Anarchist journalist and writer
The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.
Politicians never accuse you of "greed" for wanting other people's money – only for wanting to keep your own money.
The difference between a politician and a pickpocket is that the pickpocket doesn't get indignant when you tell him to keep his hands to himself.
Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
War is just one more big government program.
War nearly always serves as an occasion for serious expansions of state power and the destruction of legal protections.
There can be no such thing as "limited government," because there is no way to control an entity that in principle enjoys a monopoly of power...
Samuel Edward Konkin III (1947-2004)
Famous agorist, author of the New Libertarian Manifesto.
[O]ne commits a destructive act in order to clear the way for an even more constructive act. What object of the State could distract us to put our “dynamite” in its vile dam blocking the road to freedom? The answer is War. Not only is sabotaging the war machine satisfying, but downright urgent. Lives are at stake, either draftees from home or victims of imperialism abroad.
Remember, the Enemy we are fighting is ten thousand years old. It lurks somewhere inside nearly every person on Earth. It controls half the wealth and all the weapons of mass murder. It speaks over all the airwaves and nearly all the presses.
It is Evil. It is huge. It is the State. Can a rag-tag band of rebels such as we hope to prevail against such an overwhelming terror?
Yes, for the State is massive, yet fragile, for it is built on a foundation of lies. These lies are only now being consistently exposed. Help wield the Sword of Truth and the Shield of Valor. Renew your dedication to freedom, anarchy, and the agora.
It is the Mob of mobs, Gang of gangs, Conspiracy of conspiracies. It has murdered more people in a few recent years than all the deaths in history before that time; it has stolen in a few recent years more than all the wealth produced in history to that time; it has deluded - for its survival - more minds in a few recent years than all the irrationality of history to that time. Our Enemy, The State.
Where the State divides and conquers its opposition, Libertarianism unites and liberates. Where the State beclouds, Libertarianism clarifies; where the State conceals, Libertarianism uncovers; where the State pardons, Libertarianism accuses.
Should the taxpayers completely cut off the blood supply, the vampire State would helplessly perish, its unpaid police and army deserting almost immediately, defanging the Monster. If everyone abandoned "legal tender" for gold and goods in contracts and other exchanges, it is doubtful that even taxation could sustain the modern State.
Counter-economic entrepreneurs have an incentive to provide better security devices, places of concealment, instructions to help evasion and screen potential customers and suppliers for other counter-economic entrepreneurs. And thus is the countereconomic protection industry born.
The New Libertarian activist must keep in mind that actual defense against the State is impossible until the counter-economy has generated the syndicates of protection agencies sufficiently large to defend against the remnant of the State.
Heed well, you who would be a paladin of Liberty: never initiate any act of violence regardless how likely a "libertarian" result may appear. To do so is to reduce yourself to a statist. There are no exceptions to this rule. Either you are fundamentally consistent or not.
The previous chapter discussed some tactics in passing. A few that have been found productive for radical libertarians and the MLL include infiltration of less radical groups and sparking splits by presenting alternatives; confrontation of coercion (or deviation) with visible protest and rejection; day to day personal salesmanship among friends; libertarian social groups such as supper clubs to exchange information, goods, and support and act as a proto-agora; and, of course, publication, public speaking, writing fiction with agorist messages, and educational activities in many forms: teacher, business consultant, entertainer, revisionist historian, agorist economist, etc.
"We witness to the efficacy of freedom and exult in the intricate beauty of complex voluntary exchange. We demand the right of every ego to maximize its value without limit save that of another ego. We proclaim the age of the Market unbound, the natural and proper condition for humanity, wealth in abundance, goals without end or limit, and self-determined meaning for all: Agora.
"We challenge all who would bind us to show us cause; failing proof of our aggression we shatter our fetters. We bring to justice all who have aggressed against any, ever. We restore all who have suffered oppression to their rightful condition. And we destroy forever the Monster of the Ages, the pseudo-legitimized monopoly of coercion, from our minds and from our society, the protector of aggressors and thwarter of justice. That is, we smash the State: Anarchy.
"We exert our wills to our personal limits restrained only by consistent morality. We struggle against anti-principles which would sap our wills and combat all who physically challenge us. We rest not nor waste resource until the State is smashed and humanity has reached its agorist home. Burning with unflagging desire for Justice now and Liberty forever, we win: Action!
Agora, Anarchy, Action!
The State is the main means by which people live by plunder; the Market, in contradistinction, is the sum of human action of the productive.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949-)
Paleo-Anarchist. Economist, professor and philosopher. Author or "Democracy: The God that Failed."
A state is a territorial monopolist of compulsion--an agency which may engage in continual, institutionalized property rights violations and the exploitation--in the form of expropriation, taxation, and regulation--of private property owners.
For a rule to aspire to the rank of a law- a just rule- it is necessary that such a rule apply equally and universally to everyone.
Once the principle of government- judicial monopoly and the power to tax- is incorrectly admitted as just, any notion of restraining government power and safeguarding individual liberty and property is illusory. Rather, under monopolistic auspices the price of justice and protection will continually rise and the quality of justice and protection fall.
The state- a judicial monopoly- must be recognized as the source of de-civilization: states do not create law and order; they destroy it.
The selection of government rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for a harmless or decent person to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position as a result of their efficiency as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of government.
The American model -- democracy -- must be regarded as a historical error, economically as well as morally. Democracy promotes shortsightedness, capital waste, irresponsibility, and moral relativism. It leads to permanent compulsory income and wealth redistribution and legal uncertainty. It is counterproductive. It promotes demagoguery and egalitarianism. It is aggressive and potentially totalitarian internally, vis-a-vis its own population, as well as externally. In sum, it leads to a dramatic growth of state power, as manifested by the amount of parasitically -- by means of taxation and expropriation -- appropriated government income and wealth in relation to the amount of productively -- through market exchange -- acquired private income and wealth, and by the range and invasiveness of state legislation. Democracy is doomed to collapse, just as Soviet communism was doomed to collapse.
Contrary to still wide-spread Marxist mythology, it is not the entrepreneurs who exploit their workers. Rather, it is the occupants of the state -- the king and his court in the case of monarchy; the president, the parliament, and the so-called public service in the case of democracy, i.e., those who most vocally claim to work for the public good -- who actually live exploitatively and parasitically at the expense of others. The higher the state revenue, the better off the parasites are and/or the more parasites there are.
Finally, the most sophisticated argument in favor of the state must be briefly examined. From Hobbes on down this argument has been repeated endlessly. It runs like this: In the state of nature before the establishment of a state permanent conflict reigns. Everyone claims a right to everything, and this will result in interminable war. There is no way out of this predicament by means of agreements; for who would enforce these agreements? Whenever the situation appeared advantageous, one or both parties would break the agreement. Hence, people recognize that there is but one solution to the desideratum of peace: the establishment, per agreement, of a state, i.e., a third, independent party as ultimate judge and enforcer.
Yet if this thesis is correct and agreements require an outside enforcer to make them binding, then a state-by-agreement can never come into existence. For in order to enforce the very agreement which is to result in the formation of a state (to make this agreement binding), another outside enforcer, a prior state, would already have to exist. And in order for this state to have come into existence, yet another still earlier state must be postulated, and so on, in infinite regress.
Harold Barclay (?-)
Anarchist, professor of anthropology, with a focus on political anthropology and religion.
Anarchy is, after all, the condition in which there is the maximum diffusion of power, so that ideally it is equally distributed- in contrast to other political theories, such as Marxism, in which power is transferred from one social group (class) to another.
The issue for anarchists is not whether there should be structure or order, but what kind there should be and what its sources ought to be. The individual or group which has sufficient liberty to be self-regulating will have the highest degree of order; the imposition of order from above and outside induces resentment and rebellion where it does not encourage childlike dependence and impotence, and so becomes a force for disorder.
In other more open systems such as a democracy, there is a greater circulation or regular turnover of membership of the ruling group, so that dynasties or other kinds of closed classes of rulers do not ordinarily occur. This, of course, contributes to the illusion of equality of power in a democracy and obscures the division between rulers and ruled.
[C]learly, the anthropological record does not support Hobbes in any way. Stateless societies seem less violent and brutish than those with the state.
Above all, the state and government are organisations for war. No more efficient organisation for war has been developed.
Per Bylund (1975-)
Market Anarchist writer with a vast recognition, founder of Anarchism.net, made the Libertatis Æquilibritas symbol. Supports agorism.
Whereas the market is a state of harmony and constant creation of prosperity, the state means nothing but destruction, violence, and hostility where none was ever present. Jealousy naturally becomes native in people’s relations: the state-made losers get jealous of the privileged few, and so the formerly harmonic market society becomes split in rivaling collectives, all of which have different aims for the state after its powers have been seized.
A real anarchist is an enemy of the state. This is the obvious core and starting point, anarchism means anti-state. But it doesn’t really do to simply understand that the state is inefficient, ineffective, dangerous, and destructive. One also has to want--that is, really really want--to abolish the state altogether. So being anarchist means one really wants nothing to do with the state, and it also means any anarchist is opposed to whatever the state is about.
Counter-economics as a strategy simply means you move your resources and efforts from the taxed and regulated State-controlled market to the non-State controlled “black” market. Through establishing networks of like-minded libertarians for the exchange of goods and services, one does not have to feed the beast. This is a pretty great deal since you don’t only starve the State, you get to keep more yourself too... Reaching a certain size, the demand for other kinds of services will make people offer such things as: arbitration services, in order to solve disputes in the most efficient way; insurance and protection services, so that the “members” of the network don’t have to risk their valuables; stock exchanges, to gain investment capital; and so on.
Hostile but revealing or ironic quotes
You can not be a democrat unless you are prepared to kill. An entirely pacifist democracy might work for small homogenous groups, but not for large States with hundreds of millions of inhabitants. A large democratic State, with no armed forces, would be overwhelmed by secession.
Lea Brilmayer (ironically, a pro-democracy advocate)
There is no such thing as a good tax.
Winston Churchill
Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.
Gaius Sallustius Crispus
A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.
Justice H. Walter Croskey, in a 2008 California appeals court ruling making homeschooling illegal in California
Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.
John Davis, editor of Earth First Journal
The principle of equal rights and self-determination is not to be applied to parts of the territory of a sovereign State.
UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
Charles de Gaulle
Force always attracts men of low morality.
Albert Einstein (Communist Party member)
You do not lead by hitting people over the head — that's assault, not leadership.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Gentlemen, you see that in the anarchy in which we live society manages much as before. Take care, if our disputes last too long, that the people do not come to think they can very easily do without us.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Benjamin Franklin
What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
Rudy Giuliani
The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State
Joseph Goebbels
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Herman Goering as related to Gustave Gilbert at the Nuremberg trials, from the book Nuremberg Diary.
The intellect has grown autocratic, and has become a disease of life.
Adolph Hitler
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.
Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law,” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.
When wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality.
Thomas Jefferson
... kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.
Alun Jones, senior lawyer for the US government (2007)
One can live without candy but not without bullets.
Kim Jong Il
[A]sk not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.
If you make peaceful change impossible... you make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy
As long as capitalism and socialism exist side by side, we cannot live in peace. Eventually one of them will be victorious. A funeral anthem will be sung either for the Soviet Union or world capitalism.
Lenin
Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy.
Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.
[T]he just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed.
Abraham Lincoln
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
A wise prince will seek means by which his subjects will always and in every possible condition of things have need of his government, and then they will always be faithful to him.
Niccolo Machiavelli
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
James Madison
There is only one way to kill capitalism – by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.
Karl Marx
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Benito Mussolini
We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: ... an end to the power of the financial interests. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand. . .the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our entire system of public education ... We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents ... The government must undertake the improvement of public health - by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor ... by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth. We combat the ... materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of the common good before the individual good.
Nazi Party political program, adopted in Munich, February 24, 1920
We also understand that a declaration is not a government; a creed is not enough. The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everyone is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank or an inherited social order - if my notion of faith is no better or worse than yours, and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true and good and beautiful as yours - then how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres? Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man's freedom did not become another man's tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve their liberty. And building on this concept, political theorists writing before the American Revolution concluded that only a democracy could fulfill the need for both freedom and order - a form of government in which those who are governed grant their consent, and the laws constraining liberty are uniform, predictable, and transparent, applying equally to the rulers and the ruled.
Barrack Obama
When compared with the suppression of anarchy every other question sinks into insignificance. The anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind, and his is a deeper degree of criminality than any other. No immigrant is allowed to come to our shores if he is an anarchist; and no paper published here or abroad should be permitted circulation in this country if it propagates anarchist opinions.
Theodore Roosevelt
Each child belongs to the state
William H. Seawell, professor of education at the University of Virginia
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.
Josef Stalin
I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have the sense to do without my persuading them. That's all the powers of the President amount to.
Harry Truman
Every good Communist should know that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The Communist party must control the guns.
Mao Tse-Tung
The development of the atomic bomb during World War II, which relied heavily on European (and often Jewish) scientists who fled Hitler, is one illustration of the value of ethnic and cultural tolerance.
Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA Law School, in "Multiculturalism as a source of valuable citizens."
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
Woodrow Wilson
Quotes from Report from Iron Mountain
(yes, I know the Report is a hoax, but it was meant by its authors as truthful for the most part: "[t]o caricature the bankruptcy of the think-tank mentality by pursuing its style of scientistic thinking to its logical ends.")
War is not, as is widely assumed, primarily an instrument of policy utilized by nations to extend or defend their expressed political values or their economic interests. On the contrary, it is itself the principal basis of organization on which all modern societies are constructed. The common proximate cause of war is the apparent interference of one nation with the aspirations of another. But at the root of all ostensible differences of national interest lie the dynamic requirements of the war system itself for periodic armed conflict. Readiness for war characterizes contemporary social systems more broadly than their economic and political structures, which it subsumes.
The war system not only has been essential to the existence of nations as independent political entities, but has been equally indispensable to their stable internal political structure. Without it, no government has ever been able to obtain acquiescence in its "legitimacy," or right to rule its society. The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power. The historical record reveals one instance after another where the failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war threat led to its dissolution, by the forces of private interest, of reactions to social injustice, or of other disintegrative elements. The organization of a society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer. It is ironic that this primary function of war has been generally recognized by historians only where it has been expressly acknowledged - in the pirate societies of the great conquerors.
[T]he continuance of the war system must be assured, if for no other reason, among others, than to preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an incentive, as well as to maintain the stability of its internal organization of power.
Allegiance requires a cause; a cause requires an enemy. This much is obvious; the critical point is that the enemy that defines the cause must seem genuinely formidable. Roughly speaking, the presumed power of the "enemy" sufficient to warrant an individual sense of allegiance to a society must be proportionate to the size and complexity of the society. Today, of course, that power must be one of unprecedented magnitude and frightfulness.
Beginning with the development of iron and steel, and proceeding through the discoveries of the laws of motion and thermodynamics to the age of the atomic particle, the synthetic polymer, and the space capsule, no important scientific advance has not been at least indirectly initiated by an implicit requirement of weaponry. More prosaic examples include the transistor radio (an outgrowth of military communications requirements), the assembly line (from Civil War firearms needs), the steel-frame building (from the steel battleship), the canal lock, and so on. A typical adaptation can be seen in a device as modest as the common lawnmower; it developed from the revolving scythe devised by Leonardo da Vinci to precede a horse-powered vehicle into enemy ranks.
The dualism that characterizes the traditional dialectic of all branches of philosophy and of stable political relationships stems from war as the prototype of conflict. Except for secondary considerations, there cannot be, to put it as simply as possible, more than two sides to a question because there cannot be more than two sides to a war.
Nevertheless, an effective political substitute for war would require "alternate enemies," some of which might seem equally farfetched in the context of the current war system. It may be, for instance, that gross pollution of the environment can eventually replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as the principal apparent threat to the survival of the species. Poisoning of the air, and of the principal sources of food and water supply, is already well advanced, and at first glance would seem promising in this respect; it constitutes a threat that can be dealt with only through social organization and political power. But from present indications it will be a generation to a generation and a half before environmental pollution, however severe, will be sufficiently menacing, on a global scale, to offer a possible basis for a solution.
The war system makes the stable government of societies possible. It does this essentially by providing an external necessity for a society to accept political rule. In so doing, it establishes the basis for nationhood and the authority of government to control its constituents.
The traditional association of slavery with ancient preindustrial cultures should not blind us to its adaptability to advanced forms of social organization, nor should its equally traditional incompatibility with Western moral and economic values. It is entirely possible that the development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute prerequisite for social control in a world at peace.
As long as any society must contemplate even a remote possibility of war, it must maintain a maximum supportable population, even when so doing critically aggravates an economic liability.
Other authors
Power always thinks... that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.
John Adams
Anarchism is simply the revolutionary idea that no-one is better qualified to run your life than you are.
From "Fighting For Our Lives - An Anarchist Primer."
Where morality is present, laws are unnecessary. Without morality, laws are unenforceable.
Anonymous
When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock. When you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz.
Anonymous
Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so.
Anonymous
Whatever really useful thing government does for men, they would do for themselves if there were no government.
Anonymous
Revolution has already been televised. Revolution has been *merchandised*. Revolution is a commodity, a packaged lifestyle, available at your local mall. $19.95 gets you the black mask, the spray can, the "Crush the Fascists" protest sign, and access to your blog where you can write about the police brutality you suffered when you chained yourself to a fire hydrant. Capitalism has learned how to sell anti-capitalism.
Anonymous
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
Edward Abbey
The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
Edward Abbey
War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.
Alfred Adler
To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.
Alfred Adler
When will politicians quit insulting us by implying that we and they are the same, despite their incompetence, thievery, murder, lies, and corruption?
Becky Akers
I'll believe U.S. troops are fighting for our freedom when they surround Washington instead of Baghdad.
Wes Alexander
My recommendation is a state initiated constitutional convention that has the goal of eliminating the federal government completely; only retaining a non-binding judicial branch that would function as an arbitrator. I say get rid of government at the highest levels possible, keep it small and weak if you can't get rid of it, and never allow others to control our lives. If you think government is good or knows what it is doing, you're not paying attention.
Wes Alexander
Politics is the art of obtaining money from the rich and votes from the poor on the pretext of protecting each from the other.
Oscar Ameringer
Since authority always demands obedience, it is commonly taken for some form of power or violence. Yet authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed. Authority, on the other hand, is incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation. Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance. Against the egalitarian order of persuasion stands the authoritarian order, which is always hierarchical. If authority is to be defined at all, then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments.
Hannah Arendt
... no longer entertain the delusion that your so-called government is anything but institutionalized organized crime ensconced in an empire now teetering on the precipice of collapse. If you can digest that reality and still vote in federal elections, God help you, because you still haven't gotten that what you are voting for are hired liars, mobsters, and murderers.
Carolyn Baker
The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.
Henry Ward Beecher
When the highwayman holds his gun to your head, you turn your valuables over to him. you 'consent' all right, but you do so because you cannot help yourself, because you are compelled by his gun.
Are you not compelled to work for an employer? Your need compels you, just as the highwayman's gun. You must live.... You can't work for yourself; under the capitalist industrial system you must work for an employer. The factories, machinery, and tools belong to the employing class, so you must hire yourself out to that class in order to work and live. Whatever you work at, whoever your employer may be, it always comes down to this: you must work for him.... You are compelled.
Alexander Berkman
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
Marie Beyle
The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
Steve Biko
Today, the average man can barely tell the difference between a fact and a campaign slogan. And so the new ersatz knowledge leads him into error. Modern politics turns the voter into an enabling dupe... makes the amateur investor a chump for Wall Street... and sends the poor, hapless foot-soldier off on a fool's errand where he can only get himself killed.
Bill Bonner
For those looking for security, be forewarned that there's nothing more insecure than a political promise.
Harry Browne
The government is good at one thing... it knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say 'see if it weren't for the government you wouldn't be able to walk.'
Harry Browne
By the time of the Enlightenment, the secular nation-state had almost reached its maturity, and nationalism, the sense of nationhood, was a more or less natural repository for the sentiments of those persons for whom God had died. For many, the state, as the collectivity, moved into the gap left by the demise of the church's parental role... The death of God and the birth of the national state, and especially in its latter-day welfare state form, are two sides of the coin of history in this respect.
James Buchanan
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
My Antagonists have already done as much as I could desire. Parties in Religion and Politics make sufficient Discoveries concerning each other, to give a sober Man a proper Caution against them all. The Monarchic, Aristocratical, and Popular Partizans have been jointly laying their Axes to the Root of all Government, and have in their Turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse!
Edmund Burke
At bottom, and without special reference to immediate concrete proposals, Socialism would substitute for individual initiative collective and corporate responsibility in matters relating to property and production, in the hope thereby of correcting and overcoming the evils which attach to an individualism run wild. But we must not lose sight of the fact that the corporate or collective responsibility which it would substitute for individual initiative is only such corporate or collective responsibility as a group of these very same individuals could exercise. Therefore Socialism is primarily an attempt to overcome man's individual imperfections by adding them together, in the hope that they will cancel each other. This is not only bad mathematics, but worse psychology.
Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler (1907)
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
Albert Camus
I believe the answers to all the problems we face as a society won’t come from Washington, it will come from us. So the way we decide to live our lives and our decisions about what we buy or don’t buy are much more important than who we vote for.
Drew Carey
[D]id you ever notice, we got no war on homelessness? You know why? There’s no money in that problem! No money to be made off of the homeless. If you could find a solution to homelessness where the corporate swine and the politicians could steal a couple of million dollars each, you’d see the streets of America begin to clear up pretty god-damned quick, I’ll guarantee you that!
George Carlin
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.
George Carlin
Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.
George Carlin
The average person sees Wal-Mart, Microsoft, downsizings, oil company profits, offshoring, and all the other unsavory phenomena of the corporate global economy defended in “free market” language, and his response is “if that’s the free market, then the free market be damned.” It’s essentially the same reaction as Huckleberry Finn’s. Huck lacked the conceptual apparatus to make an effective critique of the legitimizing ideology of slavery, or to debunk the Widow Douglas’s “property rights” in Jim. He took the slave system’s ideological self-justification at face value–and then said “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The average American, likewise, looks at the inequalities and injustices of our corporatist economic system, made possible by massive state intervention on behalf of organized capital, and sees it defended as the “free market.” And his response is the same: “If this is the free market, I’ll go to hell.”
Kevin Carson
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?
Frank Chodorov
I don't like Capitalism, because I believe in free markets.
I don't like Socialism, because I believe in cooperation over conflict.
I don't like the State, because I believe in justice, peace, and security.
The Contrarian Credo
Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.
Davy Crockett
Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.
James Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual
[A]ll experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
The Declaration of Independence
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The Declaration of Independence
Anarchy is the basis for the anti-establishmentarian movement. Now it is a fad and a corporate logo. The fundamental basis for the anarchist movement is against everything it is now associated with. Corporations and mass profiteering on a political ideal. Would somebody try this with Republicans or Democrats? Hell no! Anarchy appeals to the milk-fed, sheltered Hot Topic shopping misguided children that shoot up our schools 'representing' something they don't understand.
"Disestablish This"
O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
Frederick Douglass
I am glad to see that the terror at disunion and anarchy is disappearing. Massachusetts, in its heroic day, had no government – was an anarchy. Every man stood on his own feet, was his own governor; and there was no breach of peace from Cape Cod to Mount Hoosac. California, a few years ago, by the testimony of all people at that time in the country, had the best government that ever existed. Pans of gold lay drying outside of every man’s tent, in perfect security. The land was measured into little strips of a few feet wide, all side by side. A bit of ground that your hand could cover was worth one or two hundred dollars, on the edge of your strip; and there was no dispute. Every man throughout the country was armed with knife and revolver, and it was known that instant justice would be administered to each offence, and perfect peace reigned. For the Saxon man, when he is well awake, is not a pirate but a citizen, all made of hooks and eyes, and links himself naturally to his brothers, as bees hook themselves to one another and to their queen in a loyal swarm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The next assigned cause and ground of their rebellion is, that every man hath an unalienable right to liberty; and here the words, as it happens, are not nonsense; but then they are not true; slaves there are in America; and where there are slaves, their liberty is alienated. If the Creator hath endowed man with an unalienable right to liberty, no reason in the world will justify the abridgement of that liberty, and a man hath a right to do everything that he thinks proper without controul or restraint; and upon the same principle, there can be no such things as servants, subjects, or government of any kind whatsoever. In a word, every law that hath been in the world since the formation of Adam, gives the lie to this self-evident truth, (as they are pleased to term it) ; because every law, divine or human, that is or hath been in the world, is an abridgement of man's liberty.
by "An Englishman," published in The Gentleman's Magazine, September 1776, vol. 46, pp. 403–404.
If the government directed them to do something that their reason opposed, they were to defy the government. If it told them to do what their reason would have told them to do anyway, they did not need a government.
Epictetus the Stoic
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner
Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization.
We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
Abraham Flexner
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Benjamin Franklin
What is safety without freedom? It is the life of a man in a jail cell, free from the cares of the world, without responsibility and without choice. If liberty is the price of safety, I don’t want to be safe. I want to be free.
Burt Frazier
Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
Milton Friedman
Civilization does not mean electric lights. It does not mean producing atomic bombs, either. Civilization means not killing people.
Nichidatsu Fujii
[D]emocracy is not the core of America. Liberty is.
Gary Galles
"I think it would be a good idea."
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, when asked what he thought about Western civilization.
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
John Taylor Gatto
Children are made to see, through school experiences, that their classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of self-discipline, and so ignorant that they need to be controlled and regulated for society’s good. Under such a logical regime, school terror can only be regarded as good advertising. It is sobering to think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration of human inadequacy, but that is at least one of its functions.
John Taylor Gatto
Power is not a prize to be divvied up but a disease, a psychosis of paranoia and dehumanization adept at perpetuating itself.
William Gillis
The state of society is incontestably artificial; the power of one man over another must always be derived from convention or conquest; by nature we all are equal.
William Godwin
[L]iberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving of people to think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing. It is the object of a favorable presumption. The burden of proving it inexpedient always lies and wholly lies on those who wish to abridge it by coercion.
William Godwin
Individual consent is not reflected through majority rule. Individual consent would connote volition, thus voluntarism, and thus, the elimination of the state apparatus altogether. The "state," in its generic form, is only needed to institute force upon one unwilling to join or comply, and yet it is the prevention of force that is the rationale for establishing the state.
P. Gardner Goldsmith
Our culture has come to condemn those who produce as heartless. Our society excuses those who steal as entitled, and those who kill as victims.
Terry Goodkind
There is a way out, which is to accept that anarchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. That they would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t. Some would be quite local, others global. Perhaps all they would have in common is that none would involve anyone showing up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up and do what they were told. And that, since anarchists are not actually trying to seize power within any national territory, the process of one system replacing the other will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm-the storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace-but will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would mean that there are endless examples of viable anarchism: pretty much any form of organization would count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some higher authority, from a klezmer band to the international postal service.
David Graeber
Xeer will never stop being used. Xeer is stronger than any government's laws. The government laws don't satisfy the people, they do not bring about a sufficient justice, and so they do not bring peace between the groups.
Dahir Mohamed Grasi
To be an individualist and libertarian is to understand that no one, anywhere, should ever be aggressed against by anyone, and that the state is the principal form of institutionalized aggression in our world.
Anthony Gregory
The real triumph of civilization is the extent to which coercion is banished from human relations.
Anthony Gregory
The war system has not only been essential to the existence of nations as independent political entities, but has been equally indispensable to their stable political structure. Without it, no government has ever been able to obtain acquiescence in its “legitimacy,” or the right to rule its society.
The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power. The historical record reveals one instance after another where the failure of the regime to maintain the credibility of a war threat led to its dissolution – by the forces of private interests, of reactions to social injustice, or of other disintegrative elements.
The organization of society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer... It has enabled societies to maintain the necessary class distinctions, and it has insured the subordination of the citizens to the state, by virtue of the residual war powers inherent in the concept of nationhood.
G. E Griffin
Domination is a relationship, not a condition; it depends on the participation of both parties. Hierarchical
power is not just the gun in the policeman’s hand; it is just as much the obedience of the ones who act as if it
is always pointed at them. It is not just the government and the executives and the armed forces: it extends through
society from top to bottom, as an interlocking web of control and compliance. Sometimes all it takes to be complicit
in the oppression of millions is to be a slave who dies of natural causes.
J.P. Griffin
We like to assume as we idealize democracy that common sense and officially accepted wisdom interrelate. Alas, this relationship can frequently be a negative one. What is generally accepted can and will often make no sense.
George Handlery
In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them.
Thich Nhat Hanh
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
Jimi Hendrix
Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't need them and the bad people don't follow them so what good are they?
Ammon Hennacy
An anarchist is anyone who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do.
Ammon Hennacy
If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force.
Auberon Herbert
Redistribution of income by government coercion is a form of theft. Its supporters attempt to disguise its essential character by claiming that democratic procedures give it legitimacy, but this justification is specious. Theft is theft whether it be carried out by one thief or by 100 million thieves acting in concert. And it is impossible to found a good society on the institutionalization of theft.
Robert Higgs
Don’t bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper revolution. Once each of us recognizes our own freedom and our own responsibility, then the chains that bind us will fall away.
Tom Hodgkinson
Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.
Eric Hoffer
Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”
Eric Hoffer
Force doesn't rule the world. Ideas rule the world because ideas determine in which direction people point their guns.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
The democratic regime in its peaceful façade doesn't kill an Alex every day, precisely because it kills thousands of Ahmets, Fatimas, JorJes, Jin Tiaos and Benajirs: because it assassinates systematically, structurally and without remorse the entirety of the third world, that is the global proletariat. It is in this way, through this calm everyday slaughter, that the idea of freedom is born: freedom not as a supposedly panhuman good, nor as a natural right for all, but as the war cry of the damned, as the premise of civil war.
Initiative from the occupation of the Athens School of Economics and Business, 14/12/2008
But who doesn't know that the force of the law is merely the force of the powerful? That it is law itself that allows for the exercise of violence on violence? The law is void from end to bitter end; it contains no meaning, no target other than the coded power of imposition.
Initiative from the occupation of the Athens School of Economics and Business, 14/12/2008
What do we seek? Equality. Political, economic, social. Between all people. Our possibility of convincing the servile consumers to refuse being commodities and subjects is rather limited. What can we do? Ravage and plunder the market, distribute the goods to everybody, dissolve the myths that support inequality.
Initiative from the occupation of the Athens School of Economics and Business, 14/12/2008
To be an anarchist only means that you believe that aggression is not justified, and that states necessarily employ aggression. And, therefore, that states, and the aggression they necessarily employ, are unjustified. It's quite simple, really. It's an ethical view, so no surprise it confuses utilitarians.
N. Stephan Kinsella
I maintain that it is the right of any individual person to reject and renounce a government which violates his moral conscience. I maintain that it is my personal right, in this very body, here and now, to ignore the State, and to refuse participation in its actions which violate humanity and life itself. I also declare that the same is my intention insofar as refusal to pay direct tax to any nation-state. There can be no treason if one’s first loyalty is to humanity and to life itself. Human life is above Nation-State. Personal conscience and individual moral sovereignty is above State sovereignty. How can the question of treason arise when one refuses to murder helpless women and children? He who claims self ownership can never commit treason because the State cannot own him. He is not the property of the State.
Jeff Knaebel
Why do we accept, why do we follow? We follow another's authority, another's experience and then doubt it; this search for authority and its sequel, disillusionment, is a painful process for most of us. We blame or criticize the once accepted authority, the leader, the teacher, but we do not examine our own craving for an authority who can direct our conduct. Once we understand this craving we shall comprehend the significance of doubt.
J. Krishnamurti
From my point of view the killing of another, except in defense of human life, is archistic, authoritarian, and therefore, no Anarchist can commit such deeds. It is the very opposite of what Anarchism stands for...
Joseph Labadie, Anarchism and Crime
Governments and the military purport to protect the public from enemies, and if there were no enemies they would have to invent some, for the simple purpose of rationalizing their existence...
Laurance Labadie
If you want to be a great leader, you must learn to follow the Tao. Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself.
How do I know this is so? Because in this world, the greater the restrictions and prohibitions, the more people are impoverished; the more advanced the weapons of state, the darker the nation; the more artful and crafty the plan, the stranger the outcome; the more laws are posted, the more thieves appear.
Therefore the sage says: I take no action and people are reformed. I enjoy peace and people become honest. I do nothing and people become rich. If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves.
Lao-Tzu, from the Tao Te Ching
All statist political systems exist primarily to perpetuate the power and privilege of the elites who control the system.
Steven Latulippe
Anarchy is not chaos, but order without control.
David Layson
Every vote for a governing office is an instrument for enslaving me.
Dr. M.E. Lazarus
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. If anybody can put on paper what our government and the American government, etc, and the Russian and Chinese...what they are actually trying to do, and how and what they think they are doing, I’ll be very pleased to know what they think they are doing. I think they’re all insane. But I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.
John Lennon
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive...those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.
John V. Lindsay
It is a simple truth that there is no reason to use force against people unless you are trying to steal something from them. All of the paper promises of law are worthless, because there is no intention of them being kept. If law was willing to live up to its promises, it wouldn't need to force people to accept them. The reason it must force people is because it has no intention of returning equal value for that which it takes.
Jeremy Locke
And reason…teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.
John Locke
Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.
John Locke
Political centralization is the concentration of power onto a small group of people called the state. The state is an institution which excels at nothing except the violation of rights. It has monopolized many entrepreneurial functions. These functions, ranging from the production of law and security to the management of money and banking, must be returned to entrepreneurs and provided by the free market.
Manuel Lora
Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
Thomas Macaulay
It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.
George E. MacDonald
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx
[P]olitical parties, by their nature, are there for two things alone; to take power, and to stay in power.
Rangarirai Mberi
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
The institution of the democratic State is a remarkable example of modern idolatry. By ritually celebrating elections that are played out like a great social mass, the State allows us to participate in a religion that will influence the idol in our favour. If we make the idol an offering of the right ballot, it will bring us security, lifetime employment, a guaranteed pension, free medical care, environmental protection and a good school for our children. All these favours will rain down on us. We will not have to do anything to earn them. What could be more magical than that belief?
Christian Michel
The priesthood of government officials and its protégés are able to perpetuate their exploitation through this myth of the people’s political power upon which the democratic order is based. The best way to protect oneself from their violence, and especially to protect one’s soul, is to deny their basis for power. Don’t give it legitimacy. Don’t vote. Refuse to be part of their system. A just society will not be built from above by the magic of a good government, but from below by the emancipation of each individual, one conscience at a time.
Christian Michel
Anarchy is the sure consequence of tyranny; or no power that is not limited by laws can ever be protected by them.
John Milton
Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind’s totalization may flounder.
Thomas Molnar
Anarchy is and always has been a romance. It is clearly the best way, and the only morally sensible way, to run the world – that everybody should be the master of their own destiny, everybody should be their own leader. This is something that I still believe; I think that even a cursory look around the world at the moment – particularly at the moment – would reveal that it is about .000001 percent of the world’s population that causes 99.99999 percent of the world’s problems. And that tiny percentage – it’s not the Jewish banking conspiracy, it’s not the asylum-seekers, it’s not the secret homosexual conspiracy running Hollywood, it’s not even the Scientologists: it is leaders. That what we need is an administration at most; we don’t need people to boss us about.
Alan Moore
No one is wise enough or good enough to mould the character of any child. What is wrong with our sick, neurotic world is that we have been moulded, and an adult generation that has seen two great wars and seems about to launch a third should not be trusted to mould the character of a rat.
A.S. Neill
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money – if a gun is held to his head.
P.J. O'Rourke
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P.J. O'Rourke
But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no reason to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves, like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely, sooner or later, it must occur to them to do it? And yet...
George Orwell, "1984"
The 20th Century proved, if you were paying any attention, that taxation is the great enemy of civilization. How do you think Hitler paid for that army? With voluntary contributions? How did Stalin pay for the Gulag Archipelago? With baked goods sales?
James Ostrowski
Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.
Thomas Paine
[A] long Habit of not thinking a Thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of Custom. But the Tumult soon subsides. Time makes more Converts than Reason.
Thomas Paine
You see, there are people who think the function of police is to fight crime, and that's not true. The function of the police is social control and protection of property.
Michael Parenti
Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, ‘Freedom.’ Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully.
Lucy Parsons
Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.
Lucy Parsons
No edict of law can impart to an individual a faculty denied him by nature. A government order cannot mend a broken leg, but it can command the mutilation of a sound body. It cannot bestow intelligence, but it can forbid the use of intelligence.
Isabel Paterson
Reform cannot be achieved by a well-intentioned leader who recruits his followers from the very people whose moral confusion is the cause of the disorder.
Plato
Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.
Herbert Read
Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty.
Russell Roberts (economist)
Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.
Marquis de Sade
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.
Marquis de Sade
How many examples do we have of these bodies [of the state] set up to eliminate a problem, actually eliminating it, shutting down their operations and going home?
Gregory Sams
The central state (and its governmental apparatus), by its very nature and dynamics, inevitably becomes a force alien to the interests of its people, and the stronger the state becomes, the more it enslaves people in the sense that they are required, they are forced, to do things they do not want to do; i.e., there is addilution in personal autonomy. The rhetoric of the state is one thing; its actual operations are something else again.
Seymour Sarason
America in its traditional forms is in its death throes, and no amount of institutional wizardry, halftime pep talks, or magic elixirs, will reverse the present course. As with the decline of prior civilizations, however, our future is not necessarily a bleak one. Humanity is now confronted with the choice of whether society is to continue being thought of in terms of institutionalized interests, or is to reflect the varied and spontaneous relationships that emerge from the interactions of free men and women...
Butler Shaffer
The original "naked force of conquest" had been translated into the sanctity of law.
Gene Sharp
[A]ny person who actively seeks the power of life and death over just one other human being, let alone millions of people, is deeply, irrevocably damaged in psychological terms.
Arthur Silber
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, capable not only of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting 100 impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.
Adam Smith
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Adam Smith
There can be no (logically consistent) middle ground between state-sovereignty and self-sovereignty, between absolutism and anarchism. I defend the self-sovereignty of anarchism.
George H. Smith
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.
Herbert Spencer
Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.
A pirate, from St. Augustine's "City of God"
Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist.
William Graham Sumner
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
Tacitus
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.
Francis Dashwood Tandy
The freedom of each individual denies all the freedom to invade. For when one individual invades, the activities of another are restrained.
Francis Dashwood Tandy
No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.
A. J. P. Taylor
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) -- or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The most improper job of any man, even saints, 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
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
Barbara Tuchman
[Patriotism]... is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a foot of land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting of a longline of successive "owners" who each in turn, as "patriots" with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of "robbers" who came to steal it and did--and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.
Mark Twain
Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult. Word it as softly as you please, the spirit of patriotism is the spirit of the dog and wolf. The moment there is a misunderstanding about a boundary line or a hamper of fish or some other squalid matter, see patriotism rise, and hear him split the universe with is war-whoop. The spirit of patriotism being in its nature jealous and selfish, is just in man's line, it comes natural to him- he can live up to all its requirements to the letter...
Mark Twain
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.
Alexander Fraser Tytler
Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.
Sir Peter Ustinov
The ultimate purpose of centralizing governmental powers in a bureaucratic state is to siphon wealth away from the common man and into the hands of a self-selected elite. An elite which maintains its position by political manipulation and, when necessary, by the ruthless application of homicidal violence.
Edwin Vieira
Tu ne cede malis sed contra audientur ito.
Do not yield to the bad, but always oppose it with courage.
Virgil
A compulsory political organization with a continuous organization will be called a "state" if and insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.
Max Weber
The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics...
Simone Weil
Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.
Orson Welles
I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
Robert Anton Wilson
The state is a group of persons who have and exercise supreme authority within a given territory. Strictly, we should say that a state is a group of persons who have supreme authority within a given territory or over a certain population. The state is a group of persons who have and exercise supreme authority within a given territory. Strictly, we should say that a state is a group of persons who have supreme authority within a given territory or over a certain population.
Robert Paul Wolff
The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled. It would seem, then, that there can be no resolution of the conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the putative authority of the state. Insofar as a man fulfills his obligation to make himself the author of his decisions, he will resist the state's claim to have authority over him. That is to say, he will deny that he has a duty to obey the laws of this state simply because they are the laws. In that sense, it would seem that anarchism is the only political doctrine consistent with the virtue of autonomy.
Robert Paul Wolff
Market Anarchist celebrities
Penn Gillette
May 24, 2003 Interview
Q: How do you define your politics and where did they come from?
A: I guess libertarian is a little too much government for me. I tend to be a little more anarcho-capitalist. But I will take libertarianism to get that in place, then work to get that out of place. I see libertarianism as a stepping stone.
Template created by: WebDesignHelper.co.uk |
|
|
|
Top