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The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.

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
Government
Transcendentalism
Attempt
Essence
Control

More quotes by 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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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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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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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
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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.
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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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.
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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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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 student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
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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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 cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.
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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Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.
Benjamin Tucker
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Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.
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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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