*** Official anarchist quotes thread ***

[Nielsio]

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."

"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race?"
--Frederic Bastiat


"The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security."
--Thomas Paine


"I believe that all government is evil and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time."

"The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic."
--H.L. Mencken


"Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism."

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
--Thomas Jefferson


"If man is not fit to govern himself, how can he be fit to govern someone else?"
--James Madison


"I let go of the law, and people become honest. I let go of economics, and people become prosperous. I let go of religion, and people become serene. I let go of all desire for the common good, and the good becomes common as grass. When the will to power is in charge, the higher the ideals, the lower the results."
--Lao Tzu


"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

"A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims."

"There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual but permitted to a mob."
--Ayn Rand


"The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society."
--Mark Skousen


"The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither."
--Milton Friedman


"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain--that it has either authorized such a government as we have had or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."
--Lysander Spooner


"The measure of the state's success is that the word 'anarchy' frightens people, while the word 'state' does not."
--Joseph Sobran