We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.
BENJAMIN TUCKERIf the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
More Benjamin Tucker Quotes
-
-
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 -
Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labor will be in demand, and gradually the wages of labor will rise to a level with its product.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
It is because peaceful agitation and passive resistance are effective that I uphold them, and it is because force strengthens tyranny that I condemn it. War and Authority are companions.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.
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 -
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.
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 -
Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
In the matter of the maintenance and rearing of children the Anarchists would neither institute the communistic nursery which the State Socialists favor nor keep the communistic school system which now prevails.
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
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 -
Such security is equal liberty. But it is not necessarily equality in the use of the earth.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The Anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
But which is the State’s essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
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,
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The right of the majority is absolute.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Government 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.
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 -
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?
BENJAMIN TUCKER