Anarchy | Wisdom and the Philosophy of Freedom

"The marketplace is a wondrous institution. It harnesses the self-interest of each of us and puts it to work for the benefit of all. And it does so without intruding upon our desires, our privacy, or our freedom. It is regulation by reality, not by coercion." Harry Browne

"To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty." Walt Whitman

"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

"Government doesn't work. That's the first lesson we must learn if we want to improve society." Harry Browne

"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us." Leo Tolstoi

"Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law." Allan Bloom

"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

"Until you could make out practically that great work, a combination of opposing forces, "a work of labour long, and endless praise," the utmost caution ought to have been used in the reduction of the royal power, which alone was capable of holding together the comparatively heterogeneous mass of your states. But at this day, all these considerations are unreasonable. To what end should we discuss the limitations of royal power? Your king is in prison. Why speculate on the measure and standard of liberty? I doubt much, very much indeed, whether France is at all ripe for liberty on any standard. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Edmund Burke

"If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled." Ayn Rand

"Liberty, Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge." Erich Fromm

"the government can do nothing for you. But you can do everything for yourselves" Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!" George Bernard Shaw

"The herd has absolutely no desire to destroy the master who holds the whip. The herd only wants a new master who will finally whip the people they hate." Friedrich Nietzsche