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 > Samuel Edward Konkin III

Samuel Edward Konkin III Quotes

Such an institution of coercion, centralizing immorality, directing theft and murder, and coordinating oppression on a scale inconceivable by random criminality exists. It is the Mob of mobs, Gang of gangs, Conspiracy of conspiracies. It has murdered more people in a few recent years than all the deaths in history before that time; it has stolen in a few recent years more than all the wealth produced in history to that time; it has deluded - for its survival - more minds in a few recent years than all the irrationality of history to that time. Our Enemy, The State.

Samuel Edward Konkin III

Source: New Libertarian Manifesto (1983) [link] #8

In the 20th century alone, war has murdered more than all previous deaths; taxes and inflation have stolen more than all wealth previously produced; and the political lies, propaganda, and above all, "Education," have twisted more minds than all the superstition prior: yet through all the deliberate confusion and obfuscation, the thread of reason has developed fibers of resistance to be woven into the rope of execution for the State: Libertarianism.

Samuel Edward Konkin III

Source: New Libertarian Manifesto (1983) [link] #242

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

Source: An Agorist Primer (1986) [link] #294

Capitalism means the ideology (ism) of capital or capitalists. Before Marx came along, the pure free-marketeer Thomas Hodgskin had already used the term capitalism as a pejorative; capitalists were trying to use coercion--the State--to restrict the market. Capitalism, then, does not describe a free market but a form of statism, like communism.

Samuel Edward Konkin III

Source: An Agorist Primer (1986) [link] #410

The foundation of statism is deliberate mysticism, calculated to gain the acquiescence of the oppressed or "the sanction of the victim." In order, to obtain this "authority," or legitimization of immoral actions, it creates meaningless forms to bedazzle the masses--big juju! Such was the divine rule of kings, such was nationalism, such were the emperors and czars restoring the dead glory of Rome. Such, too, is the game of democracy. The rule is to withhold violence but jockey for the use of acceptable, legitimized violence.

Samuel Edward Konkin III

Source: Invaders from the State (1976) [link] #538

We are coerced by our fellow human beings. Since they have the ability to choose to do otherwise, our condition need not be thus. Coercion is immoral, inefficient, and unnecessary for human life and fulfillment.

Samuel Edward Konkin III

Source: New Libertarian Manifesto (1983) [link] #569

A political party, then, is a collective whose overriding purpose and reason for being is to seize control of the State for plunder and coercion for its cause.

Samuel Edward Konkin III

Source: Invaders from the State (1976) [link] #586

About Samuel Edward Konkin III

(From Wikipedia)

Samuel Edward Konkin III (8 July 1947 — 23 February 2004), also known as SEK3, was an American libertarian philosopher. As the author of the publication New Libertarian Manifesto, he was a proponent of a political philosophy he named agorism.

Konkin was born in Edmonton, Alberta, to Samuel Edward Konkin II and Helen Konkin. He had one brother named Alan. He married Sheila Wymer in 1990 and had one son named Samuel Evans-Konkin. The marriage ended soon afterward. Although he was an atheist, Konkin was a lifelong fan of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Konkin was also notable for his style of dress: "To show his anarchist beliefs, he dressed completely in black, a color associated with that movement since the late nineteenth century".

On 23 February 2004, Konkin died of natural causes in his apartment in West Los Angeles, California. He was buried alongside his father in Edmonton, Alberta.

Konkin considered libertarianism radical. He was an initiator of the Agorist Institute.

Konkin rejected voting, believing it to be inconsistent with libertarian ethics. He likewise opposed involvement with the Libertarian Party, which he regarded as a statist co-option of libertarianism. He was an opponent of influential minarchist philosopher Robert Nozick, and referred to Nozick's devotees as "Nozis".

Konkin presents his strategy for achieving a libertarian society in his aforementioned manifesto. Since he rejected voting and other means by which people typically attempt social change, he encouraged people to withdraw their consent from the state by devoting their economic activities to black market and grey market sources, which would not be taxed or regulated. Konkin called "transactions on these markets, as well as other activities that bypassed the State, 'counter-economics.' Peaceful transactions take place in a free market, or agora: hence his term 'agorism' for the society he sought to achieve." He also strongly opposed the idea of intellectual property.

Konkin was editor and publisher of the irregularly-produced New Libertarian Notes (1971–1975), the New Libertarian Weekly (1975–1978), and finally New Libertarian magazine (1978–1990), the last issue of which was a special science fiction tribute featuring a Robert A. Heinlein cover (issue 187, 1990).

Konkin was an opponent of imperialism and interventionism.