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The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
Albert J. Nock
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Albert J. Nock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1870
Born: October 13
Died: 1945
Died: August 19
Autobiographer
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Philosopher
Sociologist
Scranton
Pennsylvania
History
Conquest
States
Testimony
Origin
Primitive
Manner
Positive
Confiscation
State
Originated
Known
Invariably
More quotes by Albert J. Nock
Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.
Albert J. Nock
The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit.
Albert J. Nock
When we speak freely, let us speak plainly, for plain speech is wholesome especially, plain speech about public affairs and public men.
Albert J. Nock
The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.
Albert J. Nock
Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to escape it than most people make to get it.
Albert J. Nock
Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.
Albert J. Nock
Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.
Albert J. Nock
There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.
Albert J. Nock
The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government they can use.
Albert J. Nock
Money does not pay for anything, never has, never will. It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services.
Albert J. Nock
I have often wondered why the sounds of the beating drums do not make the marching soldiers shoot their officers and go home.
Albert J. Nock
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.
Albert J. Nock
For the majority of people liberty means only the system and the administrators they are used to.
Albert J. Nock
Someone asked me years ago if it were true that I disliked Jews, and I replied that it was certainly true, not at all because they are Jews, but because they are folks, and I don’t like folks.
Albert J. Nock
The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.
Albert J. Nock
Like Prince von Bismarck in diplomacy, I have no secrets.
Albert J. Nock
You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.
Albert J. Nock
Perhaps one reason for the falling-off of belief in a continuance of conscious existence is to be found in the quality of life that most of us lead. There is not much in it with which, in any kind of reason, one can associate the idea of immortality.
Albert J. Nock
It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it, and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.
Albert J. Nock
Assuming that man has a distinct spiritual nature, a soul, why should it be thought unnatural that under appropriate conditions of maladjustment, his soul might die before his body does or that his soul might die without his knowing it?
Albert J. Nock
