Quote

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

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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
Society
Dependent
Confiscation
Purpose
Criminals
Originated
Idea
Serve
Exploiting
Social
Property
Owning
States
Completely
Conquest
Ideas
Crime
Maintaining
Kind
Class
Criminal
State
Division

More quotes by Albert J. Nock

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As a general principle, I should put it that a man's country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.
Albert J. Nock
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As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime.
Albert J. Nock
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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
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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
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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
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Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.
Albert J. Nock
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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
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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
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As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.
Albert J. Nock
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed - we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.
Albert J. Nock
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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
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As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.
Albert J. Nock
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The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.
Albert J. Nock
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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