Anarchy | Wisdom and the Philosophy of Freedom

"The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion." Murray N. Rothbard

"Tyrants must ensure that the people are poor, busy, lonely, distrustful, highly taxed, distracted by trivia, spied on, and at war." Aristoteles

"There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes." Leo Tolstoi

"These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals." Theodore J. Kaczynski

"Happy slaves are the bitterest enemies of freedom." Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

"If you believe that the most basic human liberties ought to be contingent on taking a product from a giant pharmaceutical company then you are not liberal or left wing. You’re not a conservative or patriotic. There is only one word to describe you and that is Fascist." Dave Smith

"If your answer to every failure of government is more government, you are like an alcoholic trying to drink yourself sober." Will Spencer

"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him." Robert A. Heinlein

"The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing." Albert Jay Nock

"I do not like the pretensions of Government -- the grounds on which it demands my obedience -- to be pitched too high. I don't like the medicine-man's magical pretensions nor the Bourbon's Divine Right. This is not solely because I disbelieve in magic and in Bossuet's Politique. I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands 'Thus saith the Lord', it lies, and lies dangerously. On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They 'cash in'. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants' 'science'-- they didn't think much of Hitler's racial theories or Stalin's biology. But they can be muzzled." Clive Staples Lewis

"The slave does not want to be free. He wants to become a slave driver." Gabriel Laub

"He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see." Ayn Rand

"The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men." Rose Wilder Lane

"What I say is, that the real non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never in political action. For the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through." Voltairine de Cleyre