Quote

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

Benjamin Tucker

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Benjamin Tucker
Age: 85 †
Born: 1854
Born: April 17
Died: 1939
Died: June 22
Anarchist
Economist
Journalist
Philosopher
Translator
Dartmouth
Massachusetts
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker
Essence
Control
Government
Transcendentalism
Attempt

More quotes by Benjamin Tucker

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act.
Benjamin Tucker
Image
This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.
Benjamin Tucker
Image
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
Image
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
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.
Benjamin Tucker
Image
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
Image
To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.
Benjamin Tucker
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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