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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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Benjamin Tucker
Age: 85 †
Born: 1854
Born: April 17
Died: 1939
Died: June 22
Anarchist
Economist
Journalist
Philosopher
Translator
Dartmouth
Massachusetts
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker
Question
Anarchy
Anyone
Methods
Government
Necessity
Definition
Definitions
Denies
Foreign
Legitimacy
Deny
Anarchist
Method
Attacking

More quotes by 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.
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Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act.
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We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.
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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.
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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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The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.
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.
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Monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is Liberty's work, and Down with Authority her war-cry.
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Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.
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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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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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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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And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.
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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This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.
Benjamin Tucker
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In the matter of the maintenance and rearing of children the Anarchists would neither institute the communistic nursery which the State Socialists favor nor keep the communistic school system which now prevails.
Benjamin Tucker
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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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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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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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Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.
Benjamin Tucker