Murray Rothbard Quotes

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

Official truths are often powerful illusions.

All governments, without exception, are stable only insofar as they can effectively reward and punish.

The ideology of a ruling class is of little use unless it is accepted by those being ruled.

Government is force.

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

Government is a necessary evil

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.

Autonomous state actions will regularly take forms that attempt to reinforce the authority, political longevity, and social control of the state.

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.

Power depends ultimately on physical force. By teaching people that violence is wrong (except, of course, when the system itself uses violence via the police or the military), the system maintains its monopoly on physical force and thus keeps all power in its own hands.

The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.

The state reserves the right to be the sole interpreter of the needs of society.

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another, there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us

Some forms of truth are really forms of social power and oppression.

The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school.

When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force.

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

The state is the executive committee of the ruling class.

States are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power

How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.