Aggression is simply another name for government.
BENJAMIN TUCKERGovernment 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.
More Benjamin Tucker Quotes
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He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man … or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
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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.
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Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.
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Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?
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And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.
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The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
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One thing, however, is sure, – that in all cases the effort should be to impose all the cost of repairing the wrong upon the doer of the wrong. This alone is real justice, and of course such justice is necessarily free.
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I define Anarchism as the belief in the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty; or, in other words, as the belief in every liberty except the liberty to invade.
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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.
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The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.
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It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet.
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The Anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.
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The Anarchists answer that the abolition of the State will leave in existence a defensive association, resting no longer on a compulsory but on a voluntary basis, which will restrain invaders by any means that may prove necessary.
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We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.
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Monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is Liberty’s work, and Down with Authority her war-cry.
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Man’s only right to land is his might over it. If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land from him, then the land is his neighbor’s, until the latter is dispossessed by one mightier still.
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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.
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The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.
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The right of the majority is absolute.
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In times past…it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off.
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War and Authority are companions; Peace and Liberty are companions.
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Give woman equality with man, by all means; but do it by taking power from man, not giving it to woman.
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As a choice of blessings, liberty is the greater; as a choice of evils, liberty is the smaller. Then liberty always says the Anarchist. No use of force except against the invader.
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Marx, as we have seen, solved it by declaring capital to be a different thing from product, and maintaining that it belonged to society and should be seized by society and employed for the benefit of all alike.
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Anarchism is for liberty, and neither for nor against anything else. Anarchy is the mother of co-operation, yes, just as liberty is the mother of order; but, as a matter of definition, liberty is not order nor is Anarchism co-operation.
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Mind your own business” is its own moral law. Interference with another’s business is a crime and the only crime, and as such may properly be resisted.
BENJAMIN TUCKER