Top 54 Benjamin Tucker Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Government is the assumption of authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.
Benjamin Tucker
#3. Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act.
Benjamin Tucker
#4. 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.
Benjamin Tucker
#5. War and Authority are companions; Peace and Liberty are companions.
Benjamin Tucker
#6. We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.
Benjamin Tucker
#7. Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.
Benjamin Tucker
#8. [T]he State ... gives idle capital the power of increase, and, through interest, rent, profit, and taxes, robs industrious labor of its products.
Benjamin Tucker
#10. The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.
Benjamin Tucker
#11. Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.
Benjamin Tucker
#12. Marx, as we have seen, solved it by declaring capital to be a different thing from product, and maintaining that it belonged to society and should be seized by society and employed for the benefit of all alike.
Benjamin Tucker
#13. The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism.
Benjamin Tucker
#14. The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.
Benjamin Tucker
#15. Monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is Liberty's work, and Down with Authority her war-cry.
Benjamin Tucker
#16. 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.
Benjamin Tucker
#17. For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.
Benjamin Tucker
#18. I insist that there is nothing sacred in the life of an invader, and there is no valid principle of human society that forbids the invaded to protect themselves in whatever way they can.
Benjamin Tucker
#19. 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
#20. 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.
Benjamin Tucker
#21. 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.
Benjamin Tucker
#22. Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.
Benjamin Tucker
#23. 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.
Benjamin Tucker
#24. 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
#25. We are here to let in the light of Liberty upon political superstition.
Benjamin Tucker
#26. Defence was an afterthought, prompted by necessity; and its introduction as a State function, though effected doubtless with a view to the strengthening of the State, was really and in principle the initiation of the State's destruction.
Benjamin Tucker
#27. The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.
Benjamin Tucker
#28. The government is a tyrant living by theft, and therefore has no business to engage in any business.
Benjamin Tucker
#29. Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.
Benjamin Tucker
#30. 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.
Benjamin Tucker
#31. Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism.
Benjamin Tucker
#32. 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.
Benjamin Tucker
#33. The right of such control is already admitted by the State Socialists, though they maintain that, as a matter of fact, the individual would be allowed a much larger liberty than he now enjoys.
Benjamin Tucker
#34. I have also seen it stated that Capital punishment is murder in its worst form. I should like to know upon what principle of human society these assertions are based and justified.
Benjamin Tucker
#35. The main question ... is not what motive inspired the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with the law ...
Benjamin Tucker
#36. Such security is equal liberty. But it is not necessarily equality in the use of the earth.
Benjamin Tucker
#37. But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
Benjamin Tucker
#38. The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
Benjamin Tucker
#39. Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?
Benjamin Tucker
#40. Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.
Benjamin Tucker
#41. 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.
Benjamin Tucker
#42. 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
#43. The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may be erroneous. But its truth cannot be increased or its error diminished by its acceptance by the lexicographer. Each definition must stand on its own merits.
Benjamin Tucker
#44. If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
Benjamin Tucker
#45. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.
Benjamin Tucker
#46. The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.
Benjamin Tucker
#48. 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 ... or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
Benjamin Tucker
#49. And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.
Benjamin Tucker
#50. First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice.
Benjamin Tucker
#51. This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will ...
Benjamin Tucker
#52. But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder.
Benjamin Tucker
#53. An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.
Benjamin Tucker
#54. To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.
Benjamin Tucker
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