Lysander Spooner Quotes

I'm tired of being considered property.

Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.

With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor ... Each of the things is, by the respective party, called by two different and incompatible names—liberty and tyranny.

It is not possible that one man can convert another into a piece of property, thus at once annihilating all his personal rights, without the most flagrant injustice and usurpation.

You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'

Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.

Where are the heroes and the saints, who keep a clear vision of man's greatest gift, his freedom, to oppose not only the dictatorship of the proletariat, but also the dictatorship of the benevolent state, which takes possession of the family, and of the indigent, and claims our young for war?

I'm fortunately not in a situation where someone owns me.

It is a maxim that no man was ever enslaved by influence while he was fit to be free.

At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

Every person's life is theirs by right. An individual's life can and must belong only to to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave.

So plain that no one, high or low, ever does mistake it, except in a plainly selfish way; for although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.

To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.

The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.

Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, - and it means nothing else, - the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave.

I'm not interested in being commodified. I'm not into being sold. I'm not a slave.

I'm a human being I'm not a piece of property. I am not a consignment of goods.

I have a natural right to do whatever I want with my body... as long as it doesn't affect anybody else or any other property.

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.

What vested rights so high or so sacred as a man’s right to himself, to his wife and children, to his liberty, and to the fruits of his own industry? Did not our fathers declare that those rights were inalienable?

The absolute rights of individuals may be resolved into the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right to enjoy and acquire property

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his.

No one has a right to obstruct another exercising his faculties innocently for the relief of sensibilities made a part of his nature.

Tell me not of rights; talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves! I deny the right--I acknowledge not the property! The principles, the feelings of our nature, rise in rebellion against it