Anarchy | Wisdom and the Philosophy of Freedom

"America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub." Charles Wright Mills

"The market is sovereign and in the magic economy of the small entrepreneur there is no authoritarian center... in the political sphere... the equilibrium of powers prevails, and hence there is no chance of despotism." Charles Wright Mills

"[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft." David Graeber

"Free market ideology - does anyone know where it first comes from? It comes from medieval Islam, and specifically, Shari'a. Because Shari'a provided this commercial law that is independent from the state." David Graeber

"Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority." Ayn Rand

"We want property, but property restored to its proper limits, that is to say, free distribution of the products of labour, property minus usury!" Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"It is foolishly thought by some that democratical constitutions will not, cannot, last; that the States will quarrel with each other; that a king, or at least a nobility, are indispensable for the prosperity of a nation." Lafayette

"All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government." Walter Lippmann

"The 'anti-globalisation movement' is the most significant proponent of globalisation - but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power." Noam Chomsky

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." Henry Louis Mencken

"One day is not a day of the week." Janet Anne Haradon Dailey

"No one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory." Murray Rothbard

"Western capitalism will decay, but non-Western capitalism will not take its place, certainly not on a global scale, and neither will Western non-capitalism. As to non-Western capitalism, China will for many reasons not be able to take over as capitalism’s historical host and provide an orderly global environment for its further progress. Nor will there be a co-directorate of China and the United States amicably dividing between them the task of making the world safe for capitalism. And concerning non-capitalism, there is no such thing today as a global socialist movement, comparable to the socialisms that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries so successfully confronted capitalism in national power struggles. As long as the capitalist dynamism continues to outrun collective order-making and the building of non-market institutions, as it has for several decades now, it disempowers both capitalism’s government and its opposition, with the result that capitalism can be neither reborn nor replaced." Wolfgang Streeck