A collection of quotations on the subjects of government, politics, and power from various writers. Hopefully, most of these will be new to you.
"Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is ... death! Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement." - Peter Kropotkin
"Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others? To be sure, he could mind his own business. But that is a fatuous answer, for those who are satisfied to mind their own business do not aspire to become authorities." ~ Thomas Szasz
"Anarchy is no guarantee that some people won't kill, injure, kidnap, defraud, or steal from others. Government is a guarantee that some will." - Gustave de Molinari
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." - G. K. Chesterton
"I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces." - Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Involuntary Servitude
"For centuries the State has committed mass murder and called it 'war'; then ennobled the mass slaughter that 'war' involves. For centuries the State has enslaved people into its armed battalions and called it 'conscription' in the 'national service.' For centuries the State has robbed people at bayonet point and called it 'taxation.'" - Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
". . . In regard to the so-called social contract, I have often had occasion to protest that I haven't even seen the contract, much less been asked to consent to it. A valid contract requires voluntary offer, acceptance, and consideration. I've never received an offer from my rulers, so I certainly have not accepted one; and rather than consideration, I have received nothing but contempt from the rulers, who, notwithstanding the absence of any agreement, have indubitably threatened me with grave harm in the event that I fail to comply with their edicts." - Robert Higgs
"Government cripples you, then hands you a crutch and says, 'See, if it wasn't for us, you couldn't walk.'" - Harry Browne
"Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, 'What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.'" - Saint Augustine, The City of God
"The state is the embodiment of that coercion, the institution within society that enjoys a legal monopoly on the use of force. Although people use force all the time, from criminals who rob banks to those who commit murders, the state is different in that we rightly condemn bank robbers and murderers, but approve of the state as legitimate." - David S. D'Amato, http://c4ss.org/content/7712
""If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority." - Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises
"These voters, having given their votes in secret have put it out of your power to designate your principals individually. You have no legal knowledge as to who voted for you. And being unable to designate your principals individually, you have no right to say that you have any principals. And having no right to say that you have any principals, you are mere usurpers, making laws and enforcing them upon your own authority alone. A secret ballot makes a secret government; and a secret government is nothing else than a government by conspiracy. And a government by conspiracy is the only government we now have. You say that 'every voter exercises a public trust.' Who appointed him to that trust? Nobody. He simply usurped the power; he never accepted the trust. And because he usurped the power, he dares exercise it only in secret. Not one of all the voters who helped to place you in power would have dared to do so if he had known that he was to be held personally responsible for the acts of those for whom he voted." - Lysander Spooner, Letter to Grover Cleveland
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods." - H.L. Mencken
"With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war [. . . E]ven in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle . . . In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves." - Randolph Bourne, War Is the Health of the State
"The government issued a statement this week saying most people aren't complaining about the full-body scanners. See, the government always says that. Every time there's another intrusion into our privacy, they say most people aren't complaining. Well, of course, most people aren't complaining. You know what happens when you complain at airport security? You get a colonoscopy and wind up on a terrorists watch list." - Jay Leno, January 13, 2010
"Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law." - Edward Abbey
"To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue. ... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionary possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work." - Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it." - Lord Acton
"No constitution could restrain the state. Once its monopoly of force was granted legitimacy, constitutional limits became mere fictions it could disregard; nobody could have the legal standing to enforce those limits. The state itself would decide, by force, what the constitution 'meant,' steadily ruling in its own favor and increasing its own power." - Hans-Hermann Hoppe
"Most of the ruling political parties of the world are socialist in philosophical bias if not in overt practice, and since people apparently like to believe that their own laziness, or stupidity or misfortune can be made a mortgage on other peoples' lives, they vote Socialist (or Christian Democrat, Social Democrat, Democratic Party or any of numerous other equivalents). They are usually less happy to reap the consequences of others' demand upon them, however, so socialism inevitably turns into a "dog eat dog" society where everyone is attempting to live off others' production as a 'right.'" - Douglas R. Casey, The International Man
"There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means. . . the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner." - Albert Jay Nock
"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer." - Thomas Paine
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