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

The primary contribution of government to this world is to elicit, entrench, enable, and finally to codify the most destructive aspects of the human personality.
Jeffrey Tucker

It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom. The first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.
Ludwig von Mises

Authors > Joseph A. Labadie

Joseph A. Labadie Quotes

It is a mistake often made, even by some Anarchists, to say that Anarchism aims to establish absolute freedom. Anarchism is a practical philosophy, and is not striving to do the impossible. What Anarchism aims to do, however, is to make equal freedom applicable to every human creature. The majority under this rule has no more rights than the minority, the millions no greater rights than one.

Joseph A. Labadie

Source: Anarchism: What It Is and What It Is Not (1904) [link] #358

Anarchy means no ruler, no government. That is to say, no one--minority or majority--shall have the right to make me do what I do not want to do, so long as I do not injure him, so long as I do not trespass on his just rights.

Joseph A. Labadie

Source: The Meaning of Anarchy (1896) [link] #363

The strongest point to me about Anarchism is that it permits every kind of experiment, not only in the field of "economics," but of every branch of social science. It invites competition in all things. It gives a fair field to all, and permits the best to win. I cannot say that the establishment of liberty will necessarily be followed by the universal application of mutual banks, competition, and private enterprise. And he is rash indeed who dogmatically insists that Communism will be universally applied under Anarchy. I believe the society of the future will be composed of every imaginable kind of associations for the betterment of mankind, and that the competition among them will lead to the survival of the fittest. Given equal freedom, the true need have no fear of being overcome by the false. Indeed, I believe the false contains the elements of its own correction. And this is especially so in "economics."

Joseph A. Labadie

Source: Liberty, and Why We Want It (1896) [link] #367

Joseph A. Labadie

Source: Anarchism: What It Is and What It Is Not (1904) [link] #378

People differ so widely in their notions as to what it would result were we to have universal liberty that Anarchists must, to win people to their principles, be able to show "clearly and indubitably" that it would not result in anything positively bad or injurious to society, and that it would be much better than under authority. This must be done to successfully overcome the contention that liberty would lead to murder, rape, robbery, and general retrogression. But there is not this contention between the individualist and Communist wings of Anarchism. There is nothing in either that aggresses the rights of the other... if the Communists convert a considerable number to Anarchism, and the individualists convert another goodly number to Anarchism, I can see nothing standing in the way of "pooling their issues" on Anarchism pure and simple, and let the economic results to each side take care of themselves.

Joseph A. Labadie

Source: Liberty, and Why We Want It (1896) [link] #382

Anybody is an Anarchist who will agree not to do my person violence, not to take my property without my knowledge and consent, and not to prevent me from doing whatever I choose, unless I choose to do him personal violence, or take his property without his knowledge and consent, or prevent him from doing whatever he chooses. And I ask the assistance of every such person to abolish every law and custom, and, where there is a fair probability of success, to resist every person, that stands in the way of the accomplishment of these aims.

Joseph A. Labadie

Source: Liberty, and Why We Want It (1896) [link] #433

From my point of view the killing of another, except in defense of human life, is Archistic, authoritarian, and, therefore, no Anarchist can do so. It is the very opposite of what Anarchism stands for.

Joseph A. Labadie

Source: Anarchism and Crime (1932) [link] #645

About Joseph A. Labadie

(From The Anarchist Library)

Joseph A. Labadie was born on April 18, 1850 in Paw Paw, Michigan, the descendant of 17th century French immigrants. His boyhood was a frontier existence among Pottawatomi tribes in southern Michigan, where his father served as interpreter between the Jesuit missionaries and the Indians. His only schooling was a few months in a parochial school.

At the age of 17 he began roaming the country as a “tramp” printer. In 1872 he put down roots in Detroit, working as a printer at the Detroit Post and Tribune. In 1877, Labadie, an agnostic, married his cousin, Sophie Elizabeth Archambeau, a devout Catholic. During their long and happy life together, neither tried to change the other’s religious outlook.

Labadie joined the newly formed Socialist Labor party in 1877, one of the first two non-German-born Detroiters to do so. The other was Judson Grenell, Labadie’s collaborator in publishing their first paper, the Detroit Socialist. As the Socialistic Tract Association, they printed cheap pamphlets explaining socialism, some of which they handed out free on street corners.

In 1878, Labadie, who called himself “Jo”, was chosen by Knights of Labor official Charles Litchman to organize Detroit’s first assembly, L.A. 901. It was camouflaged as the Washington Literary Society in line with the organization’s secrecy. Labadie also joined the Greenback financial reform movement, ran an unsuccessful campaign for mayor on the Greenback-Labor ticket, and served as delegate to the divisive 1880 Greenback-Labor convention in Chicago.

That year he also was instrumental in organizing the Detroit Trades Council, a city-wide assembly of trades unions, and served as its president while continuing as an official of the Knights of Labor and Socialist Labor Party. With Grenell, Labadie continued issuing a succession of labor papers, including the nationally influential Advance and Labor Leaf, and was a widely-published columnist for the labor press, recognized for his forthright style and originality of thought.

In 1883, Labadie abandoned socialism and embraced individualist anarchism. He became a close associate of Benjamin Tucker and a frequent contributor to the latter’s Liberty. Despite Labadie’s outspoken opposition to government, he was appointed clerk at Michigan’s new Bureau of Labor in Lansing, and served there a year.

After the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago triggered an anti-anarchist hysteria, which was echoed by Knights of Labor leader Terence Powderly, Labadie became Powderly’s enemy. He condemned the Knights’ leaders for a series of blunders and accused them of corruption. He visited the imprisoned Haymarket anarchists in Chicago on his way to the 1887 Knights of Labor convention in Minneapolis as delegate from Detroit. After Powderly opposed a clemency resolution for the Haymarket defendants, Labadie delivered a scathing indictment of Powderly and his ring.

Disillusioned with the Knights of Labor, Labadie in 1888 organized with Sam Goldwater the Michigan Federation of Labor, became its first president, and forged an alliance with Samuel Gompers.

In 1894, Labadie, who attributed his ill health to bad air in printing plants, went to work for the city waterworks. He founded several discussion clubs, lectured frequently on anarchism, and helped arrange appearances for anarchist Emma Goldman.

At the age of 50, he began writing verse and publishing artistic hand-crafted booklets.

In 1908, the city postal inspector banned his mail because it bore stickers with anarchist quotations. A month later, the water board dismissed him for expressing anarchist sentiments. In both cases, the officials were forced to back down in the face of massive public support for one of Detroit’s most popular figures.

Beginning in the early 1900s, Labadie’s extensive collection of labor literature was sought for their institutions by professors in the growing field of labor scholarship. Labadie chose the University of Michigan, where it formed the nucleus of the renowned present-day Labadie Collection.

The Labadies had three children: Laura, Charlotte, and Laurance. Jo Labadie died in Detroit on October 7, 1933.

Additional Resources

Joseph Labadie: An American Original | Mises Institute
Joseph A. Labadie Collection | University of Michigan Library
Jo Labadie - Wikipedia
Anarchism and Crime (1932) - Ozarkia.net