Benjamin Tucker Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

The government is a tyrant living by theft, and therefore has no business to engage in any business.

Benjamin Tucker
The moment one abandons the idea that he was born to discover what is right and enforce it upon the rest of the world, he begins to feel an increasing disposition to let others alone and to refrain even from retaliation or resistance except in those emergencies which immediately and imperatively require it.

Benjamin Tucker
To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.

Benjamin Tucker
Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

Benjamin Tucker
The Anarchists believe in the State; only they insist that the greater part, if not all, of the necessity for its existence is the result of an artificial limitation of the freedom of civil society, and that the completion of industrial freedom may one day so harmonize individuals that it will no longer be necessary to provide a guarantee of political freedom.

Benjamin Tucker
The Anarchists believe in civil society; only they insist that the freedom of civil society shall be complete instead of partial.

Benjamin Tucker
The Anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.

Benjamin Tucker
The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.

Benjamin Tucker
If I go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbor, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich. Authority may (and may not) make all men equally rich in purse; it certainly will make them equally poor in all that makes life best worth living.

Benjamin Tucker
The idea that Anarchy can be inaugurated by force is as fallacious as the idea that it can be sustained by force. Force cannot preserve Anarchy; neither can it bring it. In fact, one of the inevitable influences of the use of force is to postpone Anarchy. The only thing that force can ever do for us is to save us from extinction, to give us a longer lease of life in which to try to secure Anarchy by the only methods that can ever bring it. But this advantage is always purchased at immense cost, and its attainment is always attended by frightful risk. The attempt should be made only when the risk of any other course is greater.

Benjamin Tucker
Once for all, then, we are not opposed to the punishment of thieves and murderers; we are opposed to their manufacture.

Benjamin Tucker
In the matter of the maintenance and rearing of children the Anarchists would neither institute the communistic nursery which the State Socialists favor nor keep the communistic school system which now prevails. The nurse and the teacher, like the doctor and the preacher, must be selected voluntarily, and their services must be paid for by those who patronize them. Parental rights must not be taken away, and parental responsibilities must not be foisted upon others.

Benjamin Tucker
Taking this view of the matter, the Anarchists contend that defence is not an essential of the State, but that aggression is.

Benjamin Tucker
I have also seen it stated that Capital punishment is murder in its worst form. I should like to know upon what principle of human society these assertions are based and justified.

Benjamin Tucker
There are some troubles from which mankind can never escape.... have never claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow from authority.... As a choice of blessings, liberty is the greater; as a choice of evils, liberty is the smaller. Then liberty always says the Anarchist. No use of force except against the invader....

Benjamin Tucker
It is foolish in the extreme not only to resort to force before necessity compels, but especially to madly create the conditions that will lead to this necessity.

Benjamin Tucker
This brings us to Anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.

Benjamin Tucker
We are here to let in the light of Liberty upon political superstition.

Benjamin Tucker
I insist that there is nothing sacred in the life of an invader, and there is no valid principle of human society that forbids the invaded to protect themselves in whatever way they can.

Benjamin Tucker
Monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is Liberty's work, and "Down with Authority" her war-cry.

Benjamin Tucker
The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may be erroneous. But its truth cannot be increased or its error diminished by its acceptance by the lexicographer. Each definition must stand on its own merits.

Benjamin Tucker
The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism. Whoso knows what these two schools want and how they propose to get it understands the Socialistic movement. For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.

Benjamin Tucker
Passive resistance and boycotting are now prominent features of every great national movement.

Benjamin Tucker