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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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Lysander Spooner
Age: 79 †
Born: 1808
Born: January 19
Died: 1887
Died: May 14
Anarchist
Businessperson
Essayist
Journalist
Lawyer
Opinion Journalist
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Reality
Disciplined
Government
Murderer
Great
Bands
Governments
Organized
Constantly
Murderers
Band
Robbers
Called
Alert
More quotes by Lysander Spooner
Martyrdom is evidence only of a man's honesty - it is no evidence that he is not mistaken. Men have suffered martyrdom for all sorts of opinions in politics and in religion yet they could not therefore have all been in the right although they could give no stronger evidence that they believed themselves in the right.
Lysander Spooner
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
No government knows any limits to its power except the endurance of the people.
Lysander Spooner
Those who deny the right of a jury to protect an individual in resisting an unjust law of the government, deny him all defence whatsoever against oppression.
Lysander Spooner
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
A slave government is an oligarchy and one, too, of the most arbitrary and criminal character.
Lysander Spooner
The imaginations of believers have dressed up and exaggerated the excellence of the style and matter of the New Testament generally, in the same manner, in which they have the moral instructions of Jesus.
Lysander Spooner
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
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
The very idea of law originates in men's natural rights. There is no other standard, than natural rights, by which civil law can be measured. Law has always been the name of that rule or principle of justice, which protects those rights. Thus we speak of natural law.
Lysander Spooner
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
One essential of a free government is that it rest wholly on voluntary support. And one certain proof that a government is not free, is that it coerces more or less persons to support it, against their will.
Lysander Spooner
But for their right to judge of the law, and the justice of the law, juries would be no protection to an accused person, even as to matters of fact for, if the government can dictate to a jury any law whatever, in a criminal case, it can certainly dictate to them the laws of evidence.
Lysander Spooner
Any rule, not existing in the nature of things, or that is not permanent, universal and inflexible in its application, is no law, according to any correct definition of the term law.
Lysander Spooner
The trial by jury is a trial by 'the country,' in contradistinction to a trial by the government. The jurors are drawn by lot from the mass of the people, for the very purpose of having all classes of minds and feelings, that prevail among the people at large, represented in the jury.
Lysander Spooner
Legally speaking, the term 'public rights' is as vague and indefinite as are the terms 'public health,' 'public good,' 'public welfare,' and the like. It has no legal meaning, except when used to describe the separate, private, individual rights of a greater or less number of individuals.
Lysander Spooner
The constitution of the United States declares that no State shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts.
Lysander Spooner
Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby ameliorating their condition.
Lysander Spooner
It is self-evident that no number of men, by conspiring, and calling themselves a government, can acquire any rights whatever over other men, or other men's property, which they had not before, as individuals.
Lysander Spooner
If it be said that the consent of the strongest party in a nation, is all that is necessary to justify the establishment of a government that shall have authority over the weaker party, it may be answered that the most despotic governments in the world rest upon that very principle, viz.: the consent of the strongest party.
Lysander Spooner