Alan Bennett Quotes

I suppose what I believe in is peaceful anarchy.

Government is an unnecessary evil. Human beings, when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own behavior, can cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and helpfulness.

Certainly the worker has nothing to lose by a change from government and capitalism to a condition of no government, of anarchy. ~

There is no need for laws voted by a majority or unanimously. Every citizen, every commune and corporation will establish their own particular laws.

The Anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.

Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.

I'm building an anarchistic society from the ground up.

Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.

I know of no better name than Anarchism.

Everyone sees they cannot well live asunder, nor many together, without some rule to which all must submit.

Societies depend on agreed rules.

I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn't have a command hierarchy. It doesn't have a boss. So, all the decisions are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it.

Under socialism all will govern in turn and we will soon be accustomed to no one governing.

It is not possible to assume that a world carried on by division of labor and authority, can be governed by universal opinions in the whole population.

Everybody created his own justice and administered it for himself…. It was justice administered directly by the people in the complete absence of regular judicial bodies.

It was a republic, but unlike any other republic that had ever existed. There were neither taxes nor police, nor an army, nor an administrative officer, nor a foreign policy, nor indeed any joint means of coercion; only the heads of the scattered settlements—settlements divided one from another by snow mountains and lava fields and belts of black volcanic sand and pebbles — met together once a year in a common assembly and agreed to obey and enforce a common law.

If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

Anarchism … may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.

To people in virtually any age before our own, the only argument that mattered was between extremely small government and no government at all. Extremely small government meant there was at least some law and order; no government meant that there was not.

We've always shared everything - writing credits, all the royalties - and there's no real leader because if there was one, we'd immediately depose them.

We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.

There is, in fact, no law or government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without them.

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.