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Vices are not crimes.

Lysander Spooner

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Lysander Spooner
Age: 79 †
Born: 1808
Born: January 19
Died: 1887
Died: May 14
Anarchist
Businessperson
Essayist
Journalist
Lawyer
Opinion Journalist
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Crimes
Vices
Prison
Crime

More quotes by Lysander Spooner

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Any government, that is its own judge of, and determines authoritatively for the people, what are its own powers over the people, is an absolute government of course. It has all the powers that it chooses to exercise. There is no other or at least no more accurate definition of a despotism than this.
Lysander Spooner
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A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters.
Lysander Spooner
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The right of absolute and irresponsible dominion is the right of property, and the right of property is the right of absolute, irresponsible dominion. The two are identical the one necessarily implying the other.
Lysander Spooner
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The number who actually consented to the Constitution of the United States, at the first, was very small. Considered as the act of the whole people, the adoption of the Constitution was the merest farce and imposture, binding upon nobody.
Lysander Spooner
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Taking a man's money without his consent, is also as much robbery, when it is done by millions of men, acting in concert, and calling themselves a government, as when it is done by a single individual, acting on his own responsibility, and calling himself a highwayman.
Lysander Spooner
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If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.
Lysander Spooner
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It is manifest that the only security against the tyranny of the government lies in forcible resistance to the execution of the injustice because the injustice will certainly be executed, unless it be forcibly resisted.
Lysander Spooner
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To measure prices by a currency that is called by the same names as gold, but that is really inferior in value to gold, and then - because those prices are nominally higher than gold prices - to say that they are inflated, relatively to gold, is a perfect absurdity.
Lysander Spooner
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The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.
Lysander Spooner
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The constitution of the United States declares that no State shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts.
Lysander Spooner
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The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing.
Lysander Spooner
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To say that majorities, as such, have a right to rule minorities, is equivalent to saying that minorities have, and ought to have, no rights, except such as majorities please to allow them.
Lysander Spooner
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These so-called governments are in reality only great bands of robbers and murderers, organized, disciplined, and constantly on the alert.
Lysander Spooner
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A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases.
Lysander Spooner
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Any number of scoundrels, having money enough to start with, can establish themselves as a 'government' because, with money, they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort more money and also compel general obedience to their will.
Lysander Spooner
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Men's moral principles are weak enough without their being made subordinate to selfishness and their selfishness is quite active enough, without any such effort as Christianity makes to constitute it the mainspring of all their conduct.
Lysander Spooner
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Now it is clear, that if the government can exclude, on account either of their opinions or feelings, any persons thus drawn by lot, the trial is no longer a trial by 'the country,' but only by a portion of the country.
Lysander Spooner
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And there is no difference, in principle - but only in degree - between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.
Lysander Spooner
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That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.
Lysander Spooner
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The trial by jury might safely be introduced into a despotic government, if the jury were to exercise no right of judging of the law, or the justice of the law.
Lysander Spooner