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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
Transcendentalism
Attempt
Essence
Control
Government

More quotes by 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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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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Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.
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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.
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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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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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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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[T]he State . . . gives idle capital the power of increase, and, through interest, rent, profit, and taxes, robs industrious labor of its products.
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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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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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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Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.
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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Aggression is simply another name for government.
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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The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.
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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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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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