Robert Higgs 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.

While the state can coerce, with some exceptions (like North Korea) it seems to me misleading to think of it as capable of "enslavement."

If you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness - which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe - its criminality may be safely got on with.

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

The state represents violence in a concentrated and organize form.

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.

The State or the States.

Government is force.

Violence of the state is sublimated—it takes a very dull form.

There is no force greater than the state force.

The practice of a ruling power in the State is but a feeble proof of its legality.

… 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.

...a state is not the same thing as a society ... A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis.

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.

We still give the nation state the monopoly on the legal use of violence in our own defense.

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.

Whatever the State saith is a lie; whatever it hath is a theft: all is counterfeit in it, the gnawing, sanguinary, insatiate monster.

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.

The bigger the State, the smaller the citizen

The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

Who does not see that . . . the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?

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 absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will.