Top 40 Benjamin Tucker Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.”

— Benjamin Tucker

2. “War and Authority are companions; Peace and Liberty are companions.”

— Benjamin Tucker

3. “The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.”

— Benjamin Tucker

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

— Benjamin Tucker

5. “The shortest way to change a radical into a conservative, a liberal into a tyrant, a man into a beast, is to give him power over his fellows.”

— Benjamin Tucker

6. “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

7. “The right of the majority is absolute.”

— Benjamin Tucker

8. “An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.”

— Benjamin Tucker

9. “This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will...”

— Benjamin Tucker

10. “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.”

— Benjamin Tucker

11. “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.”

— Benjamin Tucker

12. “The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.”

— Benjamin Tucker

13. “We are here to let in the light of Liberty upon political superstition.”

— Benjamin Tucker

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

— Benjamin Tucker

15. “Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.”

— Benjamin Tucker

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

— Benjamin Tucker

17. “And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.”

— Benjamin Tucker

18. “But which is the State’s essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.”

— Benjamin Tucker

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

— Benjamin Tucker

20. “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

21. “The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.”

— Benjamin Tucker

22. “Almost the only persons who may be said to comprehend even approximately the significance, principles, and purposes of Socialism are the chief leaders of the extreme wings of the Socialistic forces, and perhaps a few of the money kings themselves.”

— Benjamin Tucker

23. “One thing, however, is sure, – that in all cases the effort should be to impose all the cost of repairing the wrong upon the doer of the wrong. This alone is real justice, and of course such justice is necessarily free.”

— Benjamin Tucker

24. “Marx, as we have seen, solved it by declaring capital to be a different thing from product, and maintaining that it belonged to society and should be seized by society and employed for the benefit of all alike.”

— Benjamin Tucker

25. “The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.”

— Benjamin Tucker

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

— Benjamin Tucker

27. “Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism.”

— Benjamin Tucker

28. “Such security is equal liberty. But it is not necessarily equality in the use of the earth.”

— Benjamin Tucker

29. “Aggression is simply another name for government.”

— Benjamin Tucker

30. “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.”

— Benjamin Tucker

31. “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

32. “Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.”

— Benjamin Tucker

33. “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

34. “And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, – at least in theory.”

— Benjamin Tucker

35. “Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.”

— Benjamin Tucker

36. “Government is the assumption of authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.”

— Benjamin Tucker

37. “First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice.”

— Benjamin Tucker

38. “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

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

— Benjamin Tucker

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

— Benjamin Tucker

41. “The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least,’ and that which governs least is no government at all.”

— Benjamin Tucker

42. “The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.”

— Benjamin Tucker

43. “The Anarchists answer that the abolition of the State will leave in existence a defensive association, resting no longer on a compulsory but on a voluntary basis, which will restrain invaders by any means that may prove necessary.”

— Benjamin Tucker