I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.
Murray Rothbard

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.
Benjamin Tucker

The state is an organization of mere mortals who, by one dubious method or another, have been allowed to don the mantle of political legitimacy and to command obedience on pain of imprisonment even of those who never consented to the preposterous arrangement.
Sheldon Richman

Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime.
Robert Higgs

The greatest achievement of the statist intellectuals is the fact that they have cultivated the masses' natural intellectual laziness (or incapacity) and never allowed for the subject to come up for serious discussion. The state is considered as an unquestionable part of the social fabric.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe

No government, so called, can reasonably be trusted for a moment, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.
Lysander Spooner

Deny human rights, and however little you may wish to do so, you will find yourself abjectly kneeling at the feet of that old-world god, Force—that grimmest and ugliest of gods that men have ever carved for themselves out of the lusts of their hearts.
Auberon Herbert

Although resting on violence, the State in the final analysis, exists by virtue of a state of mind which prevails toward it, a peculiar ignorance, delusion, and moral debility which, in the face of its unbroken record of doing nothing honestly and efficiently, tends to call on it to ameliorate any social predicament.
Laurance Labadie

The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge.
Butler Shaffer

Why don't we have libertarian anarchy? Why does government exist? The answer is that government as a whole exists because most people believe it is necessary.
David Friedman

Liberty is not a box into which people are forced. Liberty is a space in which people may live. It does not tell you how they will live. It says, eternally, only that we can.
Karl Hess

A free society is the only one in which each and every one of us can satisfy his or her subjective values without crushing others' values by violence and coercion.
Samuel Edward Konkin III

If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is important, but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.
William Godwin

Once you understand the economics of the Austrian School and the philosophy of liberty in the tradition of Rothbard, you never look at anything—not the state, the media, the central bank, the political class, nothing—the same way again.
Lew Rockwell

Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark.
F. A. Hayek

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies—almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful.
Michael Huemer

Voluntary communism, together with laissez-faire capitalism, has nothing to be ashamed of on moral and economic grounds. They can each hold up their heads, high. Far from enemies, they are merely opposite sides of the same voluntaristic coin.
Walter Block

If most people truly consent to taxes let's make them voluntary. We'll find out real quick what people consent to.
Dave Smith

Telling strangers that they do in fact consent despite them explicitly stating otherwise is a mockery of the concepts of consent and of contract, and one of the more incoherent ways used to justify state oppression.
Michael Malice

A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited. In thus imposing by force their wills upon his will, they are breaking the law of equal freedom in his person; and what the motive may be matters not.
Herbert Spencer

I don’t like the use of force. I like voluntarism. That’s what a free society is supposed to be all about.
Ron Paul

The voluntary arrangements of a private property society would be far more conducive to peace and the rule of law, than the coercive setup of a parasitical monopoly government.
Robert Murphy

Because the state necessarily commits aggression, the consistent libertarian, in opposing aggression, is also an anarchist.
Stephan Kinsella

Anyone who actually believes in the principle of non-aggression - the underlying premise of libertarianism - must be an anarchist, as it is logically impossible to oppose the initiation of violence while supporting any form of "government," which is nothing but violence.
Larken Rose

Human beings have a major cognitive dissonance problem when it comes to taxes. For some reason they don't see it as an armed extortion racket.
Jeff Berwick

Statism is the very paradoxical idea that people are inherently greedy and self-interested and therefore we should pick a handful of them and give them all the power.
Spike Cohen

The State turns every contingency into a resource for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people.
Albert Jay Nock

Market anarchism is the doctrine that the legislative, adjudicative, and protective functions unjustly and inefficiently monopolised by the coercive State should be entirely turned over to the voluntary, consensual forces of market society.
Roderick T. Long

Authors > Roderick T. Long

Roderick T. Long Quotes

Roderick T. Long

Source: About Market Anarchism [link] ID#3

A consistent peace activist must be an anarchist.

Roderick T. Long

Source: An Open Letter to the Peace Movement (March 2003) [link] ID#13

Statists tend to treat governmental edicts as though they were incantations, passing directly from decree to result, without the inconvenience of means; since in the real world the chief means employed by government is violence, threatened and actual, cloaking state decrees and their violent implementation in the garb of incantation disguises both the immorality and the inefficiency of statism by ignoring the messy path from decree to result.

Roderick T. Long

Source: Equality: The Unknown Ideal (2001) [link] ID#51

Rothbard is surely right in thinking that what we now call free-market libertarianism was originally a left-wing position. The great liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat sat on the left side of the French national assembly, with the anarcho-socialist Proudhon. Many of the causes we now think of as paradigmatically left-wing -- feminism, antiracism, antimilitarism, the defense of laborers and consumers against big business -- were traditionally embraced and promoted specifically by free-market radicals.

Roderick T. Long

Source: Rothbard's "Left and Right": Forty Years Later (2006) [link] ID#233

Anarchy is the radical notion that other people are not your property.

Roderick T. Long

Source: Austro-Athenian Empire (2007) [link] ID#419

The most succinct formulation of libertarianism I can think of is this: Other people are not your property. In other words: They are not yours to boss around. Their lives are not yours to micromanage. The fruits of their labour are not yours to dispose of. It doesn’t matter how wise or marvelous or useful it would be for other people to do whatever it is you’d like them to do. It is none of your business whether they wear their seatbelts, worship the right god, have sex with the wrong people, or engage in market transactions that irritate you. Their choices are not yours to direct. They are human beings like yourself, your equals under Natural Law. You possess no legitimate authority over them. As long as they do not themselves step over the line and start treating other people as their property, you have no moral basis for initiating violence against them – nor for authorising anyone else to do so on your behalf.

Roderick T. Long

Source: Libertarianism in One Sentence (2004) [link] ID#424

Libertarians are often baffled at how those who appear so sensitive to constraints on choice, and to differences in bargaining power, when these derive from market factors, become so amazingly oblivious to the constraint on choice, and differential bargaining power, represented by the armed might of the state, empowered to enforce its demands by legalized violence.

Roderick T. Long

Source: Equality: The Unknown Ideal (2001) [link] ID#559

About Roderick T. Long

(From Libertarianism.org)

Roderick T. Long (Harvard, A.B. 1985; Cornell, Ph.D. 1992) is Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, President of the Molinari Institute, Senior Fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society, editor of The Industrial Radical and Molinari Review, and co‐editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He has also taught philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan. He publishes in the areas of Greek philosophy, ethics, social and political philosophy (with an emphasis on libertarian and anarchist thought), philosophy of social science, and philosophy of science fiction. He blogs at Austro‐Athenian Empire and Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

Additional Resources

Praxeology.net
Molinari Institute