The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.
BENJAMIN TUCKERAnd 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.
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Anarchism may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished….. Nor does the Anarchistic scheme furnish any code of morals to be imposed upon the individual. “
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Aggression is simply another name for government.
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There are some troubles from which mankind can never escape …. have never claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow from authority ….
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Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.
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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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The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
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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.
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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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER