“Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Peace and Liberty are companions. 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I knew a girl, her name was Truth. She was a terrible liar.

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.

Illogical thinkers throw names and slurs around because they have no arguments with which to rebut their opponents. Rational people have to keep hammering their points home.

Indeed there’s a woundy luck in names.

Your name is the most important thing you own. Don’t ever do anything to disgrace or cheapen it.

We do not know what is being done in our name. Worse, we do not ask.

People always say it’s a shame someone as talented as Ryan Giggs or George Best before him never played in a World Cup or European Championship and I don’t want my name to be added to that list.

Bei Dao became the most well-known name for me because of certain criticism of my work. Bei Dao was the name under which my work was criticized. So I became more well-known under Bei Dao than under the other names.