Benjamin Tucker Quotes

The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.

We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.

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

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.

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.

Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?

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.

Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act.

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.

Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.

There is no freedom that I would grant to any man that I would refuse to woman, and there is no freedom that I would refuse to either man or woman except the freedom to invade … whoever has the ballot has the freedom to invade, and whoever wants the ballot wants the freedom to invade. Give woman equality with man, by all means; but do it by taking power from man, not giving it to woman.

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.