Albert J. Nock Quotes

If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish. If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.

… every man who puts money into the hands of a "government" (so called), puts into its hands a sword which will be used against himself, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will.

There is no such thing as a just and fair method of exercising the tremendous power that interventionism puts into the hands of the legislature and the executive.

The State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal.

Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever.

The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.

If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and . . . try freedom.

If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.

You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.

The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.

Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.

No government knows any limits to its power except the endurance of the people.

The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised - a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o'erleaps it's improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general.

The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated.

Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.

Have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden or in any manner control the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress.

The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn't represent the people. It controls them.

The state is the only institution entitled to apply coercion and compulsion and to inflict harm upon individuals. This tremendous power cannot be abandoned to the discretion of some men, however competent and clever they may deem themselves. It is necessary to restrict its application. This is the task of the laws.

The state, it cannot too often be repeated, does nothing, and can give nothing, which it does not take from somebody.

[Libertarians] don't denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don't quibble over their coercers' credentials. If you can't pay or don't want to, you don't much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration.

The state is or can be master of money, but in a free society it is master of very little else.

The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience.

It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.