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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

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Benjamin Tucker
Age: 85 †
Born: 1854
Born: April 17
Died: 1939
Died: June 22
Anarchist
Economist
Journalist
Philosopher
Translator
Dartmouth
Massachusetts
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker
Areas
Extensions
Authority
Double
Subjects
Assumption
Liberty
Area
Within
Oppression
Purpose
Boundaries
Given
Generally
Exercised
Government
Complete
Extension

More quotes by Benjamin Tucker

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And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.
Benjamin Tucker
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An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.
Benjamin Tucker
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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
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Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act.
Benjamin Tucker
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For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.
Benjamin Tucker
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The moment one abandons the idea that he was born to discover what is right and enforce it upon the rest of the world, he begins to feel an increasing disposition to let others alone and to refrain even from retaliation or resistance except in those emergencies which immediately and imperatively require it.
Benjamin Tucker
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The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
Benjamin Tucker
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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. Man's only right to land is his might over it. If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land from him, then the land is his neighbor's, until the latter is dispossessed by one mightier still.
Benjamin Tucker
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Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.
Benjamin Tucker
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Almost the only persons who may be said to comprehend even approximately the significance, principles, and purposes of Socialism are the chief leaders of the extreme wings of the Socialistic forces, and perhaps a few of the money kings themselves.
Benjamin Tucker
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Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.
Benjamin Tucker
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Aggression is simply another name for government.
Benjamin Tucker
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The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.
Benjamin Tucker
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If I can go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbor, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich it will not make all men equally rich.
Benjamin Tucker
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Voting is merely a labor-saving device for ascertaining on which side force lies and bowing to the inevitable... It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet.
Benjamin Tucker
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The shortest way to change a radical into a conservative, a liberal into a tyrant, a man into a beast, is to give him power over his fellows.
Benjamin Tucker
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To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.
Benjamin Tucker
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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
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The Anarchists answer that the abolition of the State will leave in existence a defensive association, resting no longer on a compulsory but on a voluntary basis, which will restrain invaders by any means that may prove necessary.
Benjamin Tucker
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This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.
Benjamin Tucker