Quotes

'Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.'

     

     - Edward Abbey

'The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.'

     

     - William Saroyan

'One of the most common objections to a stateless society is the fear that a political monopoly could somehow emerge from a free market of competing justice agencies. In other words, anarchism is rejected because it contains the mere possibility of political monopoly. However, if political monopoly is such a terrible evil, then a statist society – which is founded on just such a political monopoly – must be rejected even more firmly, just as we would always choose the mere possibility of cancer over actually having cancer.'

                                                                                                                       

    - Stefan Molyneux

'When you can put your finger on the men or groups that urge for America, the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic govt of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and control the world, and along with all this, proposes to alter the forms of govt to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government - then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.'

                                                                                       

    - John T. Flynn

'Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?'

     

     - Henry David Thoreau

'If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.'

     - Will Durant

'The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.'

    - Hannah Arendt

'Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.'

    - Ralph Waldo Emerson  

'When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.'

    - C.P. Snow

'The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.'

    - Charles Bukowski

'The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.'

    - E.B. White

'All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.'

    - H.L. Mencken

'Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.'

    - H.L. Mencken

'I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.'

    - Joseph Brodsky

'But whether the Constitution really be, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.'

    - Lysander Spooner

'Government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government they will have.'

    - Henry David Thoreau

'Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way.'

    - Henry David Thoreau

'There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.'

    - Henry David Thoreau

'Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.'

    - Frederic Bastiat

'The legimitate powers of government extends to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no gods. It neither picks my pockets nor breaks my legs.'

    - Thomas Jefferson

'Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.'

    - Thomas Jefferson

'Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interferences with their persons or property.'

    - Lysander Spooner

'None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.'

    - Goethe

'Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.'

    - H.L. Mencken

'The urge to save humanity is almost always a front for the urge to rule.'

    - H.L. Mencken

'Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are the most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent.'

    - H.L. Mencken

'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace armed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.'

    - H.L. Mencken

'Democracy is the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom in individual ignorance.'

     - H.L. Mencken

'There was never a good war or a bad peace.'

     - Benjamin Franklin

'Liberty is not means to a political end. It is itself the highest political end.'

     - Lord Acton

'Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.'

     - Ludwig von Mises

'Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.'

     - Albert Einstein

'Force always attracts men of low morality.'

     - Albert Einstein

'It is in war the the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in numbers, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.'

     - Murray Rothbard

'Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.'

     - C.S. Lewis

'In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty.'

     - Leo Tolstoy

'The only difference between a taxman and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.'

      - Mark Twain

'Actions speak louder than words but not nearly as often.'

     - Mark Twain

'Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.'

     - Mark Twain

'Why, the government is merely...a temporary servant...its functions are to obey orders, not originate them.'

     - Mark Twain

'Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.'

     - Thomas Paine

'Government at its best is a necessary evil, and its worst, and intolerable one.'

     - Thomas Paine

'It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.'

     - Voltaire

'In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to another.'

     - Voltaire

'I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.'

     - Alexis de Tocqueville

'The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.'

     - Herbert Spencer

'Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.'

     - George Bernard Shaw

'Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout would do more for the cause of universal peace that can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers.'

     - Frank Chodorov

'Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his.'

     - John Locke

'Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing.'

     - Ayn Rand

'War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditure.'

     - Ron Paul

'Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.'

     - Ron Paul

'Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able but not willing? Than he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?'

     - Epicurus

'Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.'

     - Rosa Luxemburg

'One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in the world can be cured by legislation.'

     - Thomas B. Reed

'The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.'

     - Tacitus

'The triumph of persuasion over force is the triumph of civilization'

     - Mark Skousen