Anarchy | Wisdom and the Philosophy of Freedom

"Governments not only are not necessary, but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions." Leo Tolstoi

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves." James Dresden

"Most gun control arguments miss the point. If all control boils fundamentally to force, how can one resist aggression without equal force? How can a truly “free” state exist if the individual citizen is enslaved to the forceful will of individual or organized aggressors? It cannot." Tiffany Madison

"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." Mahatma Gandhi

"While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State." Wladimir Lenin

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson

"These organizations represent the collective interests of the largest corporations on earth. They not only retain armies of policy wonks and researchers to articulate their agenda and form a consensus internally, but also use their massive accumulation of unwarranted influence in media, industry, and finance to manufacture a self-serving consensus internationally. To believe that this corporate-financier oligarchy would subject their agenda and fate to the whims of the voting masses is naive at best. They have painstakingly ensured that no matter who gets into office, in whatever country, the guns, the oil, the wealth and the power keep flowing perpetually into their own hands. [....] The real revolution will commence when we identify the above equation as the true brokers of power and when we begin systematically removing our dependence on them, and their influence on us from our daily lives. The global corporate-financier oligarchy needs us, we do not need them, independence from them is the key to our freedom." Tony Cartalucci

"Anarchy is no guarantee that some people won't kill, injure, kidnap, defraud, or steal from others. Government is a guarantee that some will." Gustave de Molinari

"I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers." John Taylor Gatto

"In the 1880s, people all over the world looked to America for inspiration. Its very existence was proof that it was possible to have a relatively free and peaceful country. No income tax, no foreign wars, no welfare state, no intrusions on civil liberties." Harry Edson Browne

"Some people object to libertarian ideas because there are too many irresponsible people in the world - people who will cause trouble if the government doesn't restrain them." Harry Browne

"When the mob governs, man is ruled by ignorance; when the church governs, he is ruled by superstition; and when the state governs, he is ruled by fear. Before men can live together in harmony and understanding, ignorance must be transmuted into wisdom, superstition into an illuminated faith, and fear into love." Manly P. Hall

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

"We are unable to even conceive of the immeasurable achievements, progress, and discoveries of mankind that would be attainable in an entrepreneurial environment freed from all etatism. The creative power of human nature is such that it can take root and flourish even in the narrowest crevices left by the state. But when people realize the essentially perverse nature of the state that coerces them and perceive the immeasurable possibilities that are taken away from them day after day by blocking the driving force of their entrepreneurial creativity, then social protest will increase. Then there will be calls for reforms, for dismantling the state, and for steps toward a future that we don't even know today, but that will inevitably lift human civilization to previously unimaginable heights." Jesús Huerta de Soto