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Man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion.
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
Men
Satisfy
Tends
Desires
Least
Possible
Desire
Needs
Always
Exertion
More quotes by Albert J. Nock
I am said to be difficult of acquaintance, unwilling to meet any one half way, and showing a social manner which is easy, not diffident, but formal and unresponsive, tending constantly to hold people off.
Albert J. Nock
Americans have a strange notion that the ordinary laws of economics do not apply to them. So doubtless they will think they are prosperous if the boom starts, and that deficits and indebtedness are merely signs of how prosperous they are.
Albert J. Nock
The competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises in other words, giving itself a monopoly.
Albert J. Nock
The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal society can not exist unless it goes on.
Albert J. Nock
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
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
Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.
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
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
Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an elite and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail.
Albert J. Nock
As far as I know, I have no pride of opinion.
Albert J. Nock
There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others this is the political means.
Albert J. Nock
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
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
The glossary of politics is so full of euphemistic words and phrases - as in the nature of things it must be - that one would suppose politicians must sometimes strain their wits to coin them.
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
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
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
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
