Quote

The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.

Albert J. Nock

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Albert J. Nock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1870
Born: October 13
Died: 1945
Died: August 19
Autobiographer
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Philosopher
Sociologist
Scranton
Pennsylvania
Anything
Exercise
Citizen
Punishes
Citizens
Scale
Colossal
Crime
Scales
Exercises
Wants
Lays
Theft
State
Murder
Alien
Whether
Claims
Monopoly
Organizes
Hands
Private
Organize
Unscrupulous
States
Property
Aliens
Forbids

More quotes by Albert J. Nock

Image
Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.
Albert J. Nock
Image
Man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion.
Albert J. Nock
Image
The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation - that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class - that is, for a criminal purpose.
Albert J. Nock
Image
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
Image
As far as I know, I have no pride of opinion.
Albert J. Nock
Image
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
Image
When a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the State about it.
Albert J. Nock
Image
Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.
Albert J. Nock
Image
Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.
Albert J. Nock
Image
The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.
Albert J. Nock
Image
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
Image
The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.
Albert J. Nock
Image
Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.
Albert J. Nock
Image
The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.
Albert J. Nock
Image
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
Image
The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests...
Albert J. Nock
Image
When politicians say I'm in politics, it may or may not be possible to trust them, but when they say, I'm in public service, you know you should flee.
Albert J. Nock
Image
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
Image
The civilization of a country consists in the quality of life that is lived there, and this quality shows plainest in the things that people choose to talk about when they talk together, and in the way they choose to talk about them.
Albert J. Nock
Image
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