Benjamin Tucker Government Quotations

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

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.

Anarchism does not repudiate the right of ownership, but it has a conception thereof sufficiently different from [others'] to include the possibility of an end of that social organization which will arise, not out of the ruins of government, but out of the transformation of government into voluntary association for defence.

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

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.

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.

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

Aggression is simply another name for government.

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