Lysander Spooner Quotes

Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime—that is, the design to injure the person or property of another—is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property

Freedom and slavery, the one is the name of virtue, and the other of vice, and both are acts of the will.

The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.

If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues?

The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.

Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary.

The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all.

Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

it is not the deed but the intention that makes the crime.

If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

So that every Crime is a sinne; but not every sinne a Crime.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.

Do all that you say you are going to do and don't aggress against other people or their property. That's the whole of the law. I can live with a law like that.

Cunning is none of the best nor worst qualities; it floats between virtue and vice; there is scarce any exigence where it may not, and perhaps ought not to be supplied by prudence.

Virtue is health, vice is sickness.

Evil, which is our companion all our days, is not to be treated as a foe. It is wrong to cocker vice, but we grow narrow and pithless if we are furtive about it, for this is at best a pretense, and the sage knows good and evil are kindred. The worst of men harm others, and the best injure themselves.

There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.

If ridicule were employed to laugh men out of vice and folly, it might be of some use.

Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.