Benjamin Tucker Quotes

63 quotes in 856 categories

• We are here to let in the light of Liberty upon political superstition.
• War and Authority are companions; Peace and Liberty are companions.
• Government is the assumption of authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of…
• Aggression is simply another name for government.
• It is because peaceful agitation and passive resistance are effective that I uphold them, and it is because force strengthens tyranny that I condemn it.…
• It is foolish in the extreme not only to resort to force before necessity compels, but especially to madly create the conditions that will lead…
• Voting is merely a labor-saving device for ascertaining on which side force lies and bowing to the inevitable... It is neither more nor less than…
• Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?
• One thing, however, is sure, - that in all cases the effort should be to impose all the cost of repairing the wrong upon the…
• The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that 'the best government is that which governs least,' and that which governs least is no…
• The main question ... is not what motive inspired the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with…
• An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.
• There are some troubles from which mankind can never escape .... have never claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results…
• There is no freedom that I would grant to any man that I would refuse to woman, and there is no freedom that I would…
• The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.
• The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
• If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
• Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He…
• He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is…
• This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will...

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