Quotes from Benjamin Tucker

The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.

This brings us to Anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.

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.

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

Aggression is simply another name for government.

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

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.

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

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.

Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.

Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.

Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act.

But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder.

But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.

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.

The claim of the State Socialists, however, that this right would not be exercised in matters pertaining to the individual in the more intimate and private relations of his life is not borne out by the history of governments.

And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.

Therefore coercion of the non-invasive, when justifiable at all, is to be justified on the ground that it secures, not a minimum of ' invasion, but a minimum of pain.

Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism.

Aggression is simply another name for government.

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

One thing, however, is sure, - that in all cases the effort should be to impose all the cost of repairing the wrong upon the doer of the wrong. This alone is real justice, and of course such justice is necessarily free.

Such security is equal liberty. But it is not necessarily equality in the use of the earth.