There are some troubles from which mankind can never escape .... have never claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow from authority .... As a choice of blessings, liberty is the greater; as a choice of evils, liberty is the smaller. Then liberty always says the Anarchist. No use of force except against the invader.

Benjamin Tucker

Categorized in : Evil Blessing Perfection

If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.

Benjamin Tucker

anarchist anarchy government

Aggression is simply another name for government.

Benjamin Tucker

aggression government names

Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.

Benjamin Tucker

anarchist democrat

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

Benjamin Tucker

essence names men

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

tyrants power men

To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.

Benjamin Tucker

insult-to-injury liberty men

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

emergencies world ideas

It is not competition, but monopoly, that deprives labor of its product. Destroy the banking monopoly, establish freedom in finance, and down will go interest on money through the beneficent influence of competition. Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labor will be in demand, and gradually the wages of labor will rise to a level with its product.

Benjamin Tucker

banking competition wages

Anarchism is for liberty, and neither for nor against anything else. Anarchy is the mother of co-operation, yes, just as liberty is the mother of order; but, as a matter of definition, liberty is not order nor is Anarchism co-operation. I define Anarchism as the belief in the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty; or, in other words, as the belief in every liberty except the liberty to invade.

Benjamin Tucker

liberty mother order

Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?

Benjamin Tucker

slavery privilege voting

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

bully voting lying

The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.

Benjamin Tucker

unnecessary anarchy evil

It will probably surprise many who know nothing of Proudhon save his declaration that 'property is robbery' to learn that he was perhaps the most vigorous hater of Communism that ever lived on this planet. But the apparent inconsistency vanishes when you read his book and find that by property he means simply legally privileged wealth or the power of usury, and not at all the possession by the labourer of his products.

Benjamin Tucker

usury mean book

War and Authority are companions; Peace and Liberty are companions.

Benjamin Tucker

liberty authority war

This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.

Benjamin Tucker

anarchy definitions government

There is no freedom that I would grant to any man that I would refuse to woman, and there is no freedom that I would refuse to either man or woman except the freedom to invade ... whoever has the ballot has the freedom to invade, and whoever wants the ballot wants the freedom to invade. Give woman equality with man, by all means; but do it by taking power from man, not giving it to woman.

Benjamin Tucker

giving men mean

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

anarchist liberty perfection

The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that 'the best government is that which governs least,' and that which governs least is no government at all.

Benjamin Tucker

anarchy government believe

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

long-ago men past

The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.

Benjamin Tucker

moments victim justice