“But 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.”

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.

At all times, in every century, every age, there has been such a connection between despotism and religion that it is infinitely apparent and demonstrated a thousand times over, that in destroying one, the other must be undermined.

The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God.

It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.

Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

There is something very human in this apparent mirth and mockery of the squirrels. It seems to be a sort of ironical laughter, and implies self-conscious pride and exultation in the laughter.

Today, the number of migrants crossing is at a 30-year low. That’s because of years of bipartisan work on this issue.