Top 90 Lysander Spooner Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “All legitimate government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily agreed upon by the parties to it, for the protection of their rights against wrong-doers. In its voluntary character it is precisely similar to an association for mutual protection against fire or shipwreck.”

— Lysander Spooner

52. “The number who actually consented to the Constitution of the United States, at the first, was very small. Considered as the act of the whole people, the adoption of the Constitution was the merest farce and imposture, binding upon nobody.”

— Lysander Spooner

53. “All know the importance of sustaining the hopes of a sick man. The reason of this is that his nervous system is then, vastly more than in health, susceptible to the influence of particular states of the mind.”

— Lysander Spooner

54. “The very idea of law originates in men’s natural rights. There is no other standard, than natural rights, by which civil law can be measured. Law has always been the name of that rule or principle of justice, which protects those rights. Thus we speak of natural law.”

— Lysander Spooner

55. “Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.”

— Lysander Spooner

56. “Any rule, not existing in the nature of things, or that is not permanent, universal and inflexible in its application, is no law, according to any correct definition of the term law.”

— Lysander Spooner

57. “A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and irresponsible.6.”

— Lysander Spooner

58. “It is a natural impossibility for any man to make a binding contract, by which he shall surrender to others a single one of what are commonly called his ‘natural, inherent, inalienable rights.’”

— Lysander Spooner

59. “Money is the great instrumentality for manufacturing.”

— Lysander Spooner

60. “Jesus never instructed men to do what was right because it was right; yet this is the true reason why they should do it.”

— Lysander Spooner

61. “A married woman has the same natural right to acquire and hold property, and to make all contracts that she is mentally competent to make reasonably, as has a married man, or any other man.”

— Lysander Spooner

62. “All governments, the worst on earth, and the most tyrannical on earth, are free governments to that portion of the people who voluntarily support them.”

— Lysander Spooner

63. “If a jury have not the right to judge between the government and those who disobey its laws, and resist its oppressions, the government is absolute, and the people, legally speaking, are slaves.”

— Lysander Spooner

64. “Men’s moral principles are weak enough without their being made subordinate to selfishness; and their selfishness is quite active enough, without any such effort as Christianity makes to constitute it the mainspring of all their conduct.”

— Lysander Spooner

65. “Slavery, if it can be legalized at all, can be legalized only by positive legislation. Natural law gives it no aid. Custom imparts to it no legal sanction.”

— Lysander Spooner

66. “If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.”

— Lysander Spooner

67. “If men were but to read the New Testament with the same tone and emphasis, with which they do other books, and were to keep out of mind the idea of its being sacred, they would be disgusted with the credulity, and the want of intellect, reason and judgment, that is apparent in it.”

— Lysander Spooner

68. “Now it is clear, that if the government can exclude, on account either of their opinions or feelings, any persons thus drawn by lot, the trial is no longer a trial by ‘the country,’ but only by a portion of the country.”

— Lysander Spooner

69. “In reality there is no such thing as an inflation of prices, relatively to gold. There is such a thing as a depreciated paper currency.”

— Lysander Spooner

70. “The law does not require a man to cease to be a man, and act without regard to consequences, when he becomes a juror.”

— Lysander Spooner

71. “Still another and all-sufficient answer to the argument that the use of spirituous liquors tends to poverty, is that, as a general rule, it puts the effect before the cause. It assumes that it is the use of the liquors that causes the poverty, instead of its being the poverty that causes the use of the liquors.”

— Lysander Spooner

72. “The desertion of Jesus, by his followers, furnishes an argument in support of the supposition that he attempted to be king of the Jews, rather than that he was a superior being.”

— Lysander Spooner

73. “Doing a thing by law, or according to law, is only carrying the law into execution. And punishing a man by, or according to, the sentence or judgment of his peers, is only carrying that sentence or judgment into execution.”

— Lysander Spooner

74. “Legally speaking, the term ‘public rights’ is as vague and indefinite as are the terms ‘public health,’ ‘public good,’ ‘public welfare,’ and the like. It has no legal meaning, except when used to describe the separate, private, individual rights of a greater or less number of individuals.”

— Lysander Spooner

75. “Still another reason why the payment of taxes implies no consent, or pledge, to support the government, is that the taxpayer does not know, and has no means of knowing, who the particular individuals are who compose “the government.” To him “the government” is a myth, an abstraction, an incorporeality, with which he can make no contract, and to which he can give no consent, and make no pledge. He knows it only through its pretended agents. “The government” itself he never sees.”

— Lysander Spooner

76. “Not knowing who the particular individuals are, who call themselves “the government,” the taxpayer does not know whom he pays his taxes to. All he knows is that a man comes to him, representing himself to be the agent of “the government” – that is, the agent of a secret band of robbers and murderers, who have taken to themselves the title of “the government,” and have determined to kill everybody who refuses to give them whatever money they demand.”

— Lysander Spooner

77. “Those who deny the right of a jury to protect an individual in resisting an unjust law of the government, deny him all defence whatsoever against oppression.”

— Lysander Spooner

78. “Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.”

— Lysander Spooner

79. “The trial by jury might safely be introduced into a despotic government, if the jury were to exercise no right of judging of the law, or the justice of the law.”

— Lysander Spooner

80. “The imaginations of believers have dressed up and exaggerated the excellence of the style and matter of the New Testament generally, in the same manner, in which they have the moral instructions of Jesus.”

— Lysander Spooner

81. “No body of men can be said to authorize a man to act as their agent, to the injury of a third person.”

— Lysander Spooner

82. “That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.”

— Lysander Spooner

83. “And their representatives at Philadelphia, who first declared Independence, were, in the eye of the constitutional law of that day, simply a committee of Revolutionists, and in no sense constitutional authorities, or the representatives of constitutional authorities.”

— Lysander Spooner

84. “If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth; what rights are, therefore, inherent in him as a human being, necessarily remain with him during life; and, however capable of being trampled upon, are incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated or eliminated from his nature as a human being, or deprived of their inherent authority or obligation.”

— Lysander Spooner

85. “Still another of the frauds of these men is, that they are now establishing, and that the war was designed to establish, “a government of consent.” The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this – that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot. This idea was the dominant one on which the war was carried on; and it is the dominant one, now that we have got what is called “peace.”

— Lysander Spooner

86. “Practically and commercially speaking, a dollar is not necessarily a specific thing, made of silver, or gold, or any other single metal, or substance. It is only such a quantum of market value as exists in a given piece of silver or gold.”

— Lysander Spooner

87. “There is perhaps not an enlightened Christian in America who, notwithstanding he may believe that, at the time of Jesus, men were possessed of devils, believes that they ever have been in any other instance, either before or since.”

— Lysander Spooner

88. “Majorities and minorities cannot rightfully be taken at all into account in deciding questions of justice.”

— Lysander Spooner

89. “To measure prices by a currency that is called by the same names as gold, but that is really inferior in value to gold, and then – because those prices are nominally higher than gold prices – to say that they are inflated, relatively to gold, is a perfect absurdity.”

— Lysander Spooner

90. “A man’s ‘original and natural right’ to make all contracts that are ‘intrinsically obligatory,’ and to coerce the fulfillment of them, is one of the most valuable and indispensable of all human possessions.”

— Lysander Spooner

91. “Previous to the war, there were some grounds for saying that – in theory, at least, if not in practice – our government was a free one; that it rested on consent. But nothing of that kind can be said now, if the principle on which the war was carried on by the North, is irrevocably established. If that principle be not the principle of the Constitution, the fact should be known. If it be the principle of the Constitution, the Constitution itself should be at once overthrown.”

— Lysander Spooner

92. “It is plain, therefore, that if, when the Constitution says treason, it means treason – treason in fact, and nothing else – there is no ground at all for pretending that the Southern people have committed that crime. But if, on the other hand, when the Constitution says treason, it means what the Czar and the Kaiser mean by treason, then our government is, in principle, no better than theirs; and has no claim whatever to be considered a free government.”

— Lysander Spooner