Anarchy | Wisdom and the Philosophy of Freedom

"Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth." Erich Fromm

"If the government was replaced by the mafia we'd probably have half as much corruption and twice as much fun." Klaus Kinski

"I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"I want them to understand taxes as theft, politicians as thieves, and the entire state apparatus and bureaucracy as a mafia." Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"If you entrust the government with managing the Sahara, there would be a sand shortage in five years." Milton Friedman

"It took us a thousand years to realize that we do not need emperors, kings, and princes to dictate what we must do and refrain from doing. Hopefully, we will not need another thousand years to understand that we also do not need governments, parties, politicians, or officials for that." Roland Baader

"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." Thomas Jefferson

"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

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand." Milton Friedman

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests." Gore Vidal

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." Denis Diderot

"The power system continues only as long as individuals try to get something for nothing. The day when a majority of individuals declares or acts as if it wants nothing from the government, declares that it will look after its own welfare and interests, then on that day the power elites are doomed." Antony Cyril Sutton

"The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power." Lew Nikolajewitsch Graf Tolstoi