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 > Wendy McElroy

Wendy McElroy Quotes

The freedom of individuals to choose, without intrusive state regulation, is the prerequisite of morality. A coerced "choice" does not reflect virtue, only compliance. In other words, you cannot force a person to be moral; you can only make them conform. True morality requires freedom and cannot exist without it.

Wendy McElroy

Source: There Ought Not to Be a Law (2003) [link] #326

A person is as free as his ability to say "no."

Wendy McElroy

Source: Non-Cooperation as a One-on-One Strategy (2013) [link] #327

It is not the particular man in power that I oppose but the power itself, which is unjust.

Wendy McElroy

Source: Reason Magazine (2004) [link] #426

Libertarianism is a direct attack upon the mystique of the State. It recognizes that the State is only an abstraction and reduces it to the actions of individuals. It applies the same standard of morality to the State as it would to a next-door neighbor. If it is not proper for a neighbor to tax or pass laws regulating your private life, then it cannot be proper for the State to do so. Only by elevating itself above the standards of personal morality can the State make these claims on your life.

Wendy McElroy

Source: Demystifying the State (1983) [link] #447

Your right to life and to liberty are not merely inalienable, they are also indivisible. A right to life means it is your due as a human being to be left in peace by others so long as you respect their equal claim. A right to liberty means you are entitled to the peaceful use of whatever is yours--your body, your labor, your property.

Wendy McElroy

Source: The Art of Being Free (2012) [link] #500

The historical pedigree of classical liberalism as an ideology that champions the average, working person is unparalleled. Whenever, wherever it has come to dominate, the ultimate result has been greater liberty, prosperity and peace.

Wendy McElroy

Source: The Art of Being Free (2012) [link] #540

The battle against statism today is not a battle against any particular politician. The issue is deeper. It is a battle against a way of thinking, a way of viewing the State. The main victory of the State has been within the minds of the people who obey.

Wendy McElroy

Source: Demystifying the State (1983) [link] #561

Mystification is the process by which the commonplace is elevated to the level of the divine by those who have a vested interest in its unassailability. Government is a perfect example of mystification at work. Government is a group of individuals organized for the purpose of extracting wealth and exerting power over people and resources in a given geographic area. Ordinarily people object to and resist thieves and robbers; but in the case of government, they do not because the government has created a mystique of legitimacy about its activities.

Wendy McElroy

Source: Demystifying the State (1983) [link] #617

About Wendy McElroy

(From Wikipedia)

Wendy McElroy (born 1951) is a Canadian individualist feminist and voluntaryist writer. McElroy is the editor of the website ifeminists.net.

McElroy is the author of the book Rape Culture Hysteria, in which she contends that rape culture is a result of popular hysteria to the disadvantage of men, and in particular, white men.

In November 2014, McElroy was scheduled to debate Jessica Valenti at a Brown University Janus Forum debate on "How Should Colleges Handle Sexual Assault?". Before the debate, Brown President Christina Paxson sent out a campus-wide e-mail saying she disagreed with McElroy's views, and set up an alternative event at the same time to compete with the debate. The actions of Brown students and Paxson were criticized by various commentators.

Additional Resources

WendyMcElroy.com
ifeminists.com