Voltairine de Cleyre Quotes
A man won't steal, ordinarily, unless that which he steals is something he cannot as easily get without stealing; in liberty the cost of stealing would involve greater difficulties than producing, and consequently he would not be apt to steal.
de Cleyre, Voltairine. "Anarchism." Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, edited by Alexander Berkman, Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1914.
Alluding to the high cost of the NASA space program and playing off the "free lunch" phrase that is used so often.
He was one of the longest serving District Attorneys in America, He also served the largest jurisdiction of a District Attorney. When he first was elected DA of Manhattan there were over 600 murders a year. When he retired, there were only about 60, a 90% reduction. Yet, his experience was that capital punishment was useless in deterring murder. He had many other techniques far more effective.
It is a common misconception that anarchists would not have any societal mechanism for preventing and combatting crime. Anarchists believe in the long run that with anarchism the reasons and motivations for crime will disappear, but until then they generally have been willing to use force to protect against force being used against the citizens. To critics, this seems to be government, and a government which uses force. Anarchists have never well detailed how they would manage such a seemingly conflicting situation.
Parker and other escaped slaves in Christiana fought off slave catchers and killed the slave owner leading them. Charged with treason, he escaped to Canada with his family and lived there the rest of his life. While not a polished writer, after he himself had escaped and went to Christiana and leaned to read and write. He wrote this narrative of his life as a slave—one of the few written works we have from slaves.
This is a very clear statement of a theory offered by some gun advocates. Opponents observe that if this were true, the parts of the country that had the highest gun ownership would have the lowest gun deaths and crime in general, but that is not true. Obversely, when some jurisdictions like Florida have made guns easier to obtain, the crime rate has not increased as some gun opponents would predict.
Voltairine de Cleyre was an American anarchist known for being a prolific writer and speaker who opposed capitalism, marriage and the state as well as the domination of religion over sexuality and women's lives which she saw as all interconnected. She is often characterized as a major early feminist because of her views.
