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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
Control
Government
Transcendentalism
Attempt
Essence

More quotes by 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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Aggression is simply another name for government.
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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We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.
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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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First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice.
Benjamin Tucker
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The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.
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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The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
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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Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.
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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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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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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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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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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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 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 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