But which is the State’s essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
BENJAMIN TUCKERPeace 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.
More Benjamin Tucker Quotes
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The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.
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 -
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 -
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 -
We are here to let in the light of Liberty upon political superstition.
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 -
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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet.
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 -
We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
I define Anarchism as the belief in the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty; or, in other words, as the belief in every liberty except the liberty to invade.
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 -
Anarchism is for liberty, and neither for nor against anything else. Anarchy is the mother of co-operation, yes, just as liberty is the mother of order; but, as a matter of definition, liberty is not order nor is Anarchism co-operation.
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