Benjamin Tucker Quotes

If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.

Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.

Aggression is simply another name for government.

To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.

The shortest way to change a radical into a conservative, a liberal into a tyrant, a man into a beast, is to give him power over his fellows.

But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.

The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.

The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.

War and Authority are companions; Peace and Liberty are companions.

Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?

The Anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.

The right of the majority is absolute.

The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.

This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.

The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that 'the best government is that which governs least,' and that which governs least is no government at all.

The main question ... is not what motive inspired the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with the law.

The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.

Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice.

[T]he State . . . gives idle capital the power of increase, and, through interest, rent, profit, and taxes, robs industrious labor of its products.

Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism

If I can go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbor, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich.

Therefore coercion of the non-invasive, when justifiable at all, is to be justified on the ground that it secures, not a minimum of ' invasion, but a minimum of pain.

Such security is equal liberty. But it is not necessarily equality in the use of the earth.

The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.

And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.

Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.

Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.

For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.

We are here to let in the light of Liberty upon political superstition.

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.

It is foolish in the extreme not only to resort to force before necessity compels, but especially to madly create the conditions that will lead to this necessity.

We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.

The government is a tyrant living by theft, and therefore has no business to engage in any business.

Monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is Liberty's work, and Down with Authority her war-cry.

Government is the assumption of authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.

The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.

Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act.

I have also seen it stated that Capital punishment is murder in its worst form. I should like to know upon what principle of human society these assertions are based and justified.