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

A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions, calling themselves a government.
Lysander Spooner

Set men up to rule their fellow-men, to treat them as mere soulless material with which they may deal as they please, and the consequence is that you sweep away every moral landmark and turn this world into a place of selfish striving, hopeless confusion, trickery and violence, a mere scrambling ground for the strongest or the most cunning or the most numerous.
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

History shows that the masses are always improved in mental, moral, and material conditions as the powers of the state over the individuals are reduced. As man becomes more enlightened regarding his interests, individual and collective, he insists that forcible authority over him and his conduct shall be abolished.
Joseph A. Labadie

Authors > Anselme Bellegarrigue

Anselme Bellegarrigue Quotes

Power only possesses what it takes from the people, and for the citizens to believe that they have to give what they have in order to get welfare, their common sense must have been deeply distorted.

Anselme Bellegarrigue

Source: Unknown #353

Anarchy is order, government is civil war.

Anselme Bellegarrigue

Source: The World's First Anarchist Manifesto (1850) [link] #354

So I hear that liberty without brakes is menacing. Who is she menacing? Who shall fear the untamed horse, but one who would tame it? Who shall fear an avalanche, but one who would stop it? Who trembles in front of liberty, but tyranny? A menacing liberty... one ought to say it's the opposite. What is frightening in her is the sound of her irons. Once those are shattered, she is no more tumultuous; but calm and wise.

Anselme Bellegarrigue

Source: Unknown #355

History has described as “anarchic” the condition of a people wherein there are several governments in contention one with another, but the condition of a people desirous of being governed but bereft of government precisely because it has too many is one thing and the condition of a people desirous of governing itself and bereft of government precisely because it wishes none quite another.

Anselme Bellegarrigue

Source: The World's First Anarchist Manifesto (1850) [link] #359

Up to now you have believed in the existence of tyrants. Well, you were mistaken. There are only slaves. Where none obeys, none commands.

Anselme Bellegarrigue

Source: The World's First Anarchist Manifesto (1850) [link] #362

Governments, whose pupils we are, have naturally found nothing better to devise than to school us in fear and horror of their destruction. But as governments in turn are the negations of individuals or of the people, it is reasonable that the latter, waking up to essential truths, should gradually come to feel a greater horror at its own annihilation than that of its masters.

Anselme Bellegarrigue

Source: The World's First Anarchist Manifesto (1850) [link] #375

There is no power that is not the enemy of the people, because, no matter what the attendant conditions, no matter who the man invested with it, no matter how it may be described, power is always power, that is to say, the irrefutable badge of abdication of the people’s sovereignty and consecration of supreme overlordship.

Anselme Bellegarrigue

Source: The World's First Anarchist Manifesto (1850) [link] #666

About Anselme Bellegarrigue

(From Wikipedia)

Anselme Bellegarrigue (23 March 1813, Monfort - ca. 1869, Central America) was a French individualist anarchist. He participated in the French Revolution of 1848, was author and editor of Anarchie, Journal de l'Ordre and Au fait ! Au fait ! Interprétation de l'idée démocratique.

For anarchist historian George Woodcock "Bellegarrigue stood near to Stirner at the individualist end of the anarchist spectrum. He dissociated himself from all the political revolutionaries of 1848, and even Proudhon, whom he resembled in many of his ideas and from whom he derived more than he was inclined to admit." Bellegarrigue's "conception of revolution by civil disobedience suggests that in America Bellegarrigue may have made contact with at least the ideas of [Henry David] Thoreau".

"At times Bellegarrigue spoke in the words of solipsistic egoism. "I deny everything; I affirm only myself.... I am, that is a positive fact. All the rest is abstract and falls into Mathematical X, into the unknown.... There can be on earth no interest superior to mine, no interest to which I owe even the partial sacrifice of my interests." Yet in apparent contradiction, Bellegarrigue adhered to the central anarchist tradition in his idea of society as necessary and natural and as having "a primordial existence"."

Additional Resources

George Woodcock - Anselme Bellegarrigue
Max Nettlau - Anselme Bellegarrigue