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 TUCKERBut the apparent inconsistency vanishes when you read his book and find that by property he means simply legally privileged wealth or the power of usury, and not at all the possession by the labourer of his products.
More Benjamin Tucker Quotes
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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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
But which is the State’s essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Whoso knows what these two schools want and how they propose to get it understands the Socialistic movement.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
After the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
It will probably surprise many who know nothing of Proudhon save his declaration that ‘property is robbery’ to learn that he was perhaps the most vigorous hater of Communism that ever lived on this planet.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
War and Authority are companions; Peace and Liberty are companions.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
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.
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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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER