Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? ... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

What, then, is legislation? It is an assumption by one man, or body of men, of absolute, irresponsible dominion over all other men whom they can subject to their power. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to subject all other men to their will and their service. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to abolish outright all the natural rights, all the natural liberty of all other men; to make all other men their slaves; to arbitrarily dictate to all other men what they may, and may not, do; what they may, and may not, have; what they may, and may not, be. It is, in short, the assumption of a right to banish the principle of human rights, the principle of justice itself, from off the earth, and set up their own personal will, pleasure, and interest in its place. All this, and nothing less, is involved in the very idea that there can be any such thing as human legislation that is obligatory upon those upon whom it is imposed.

The average man, on being told that the anarchist would abolish all governmental restraints, not unnaturally concludes that the proposition involves the removal of the restrictions upon criminal conduct, the relinquishment of organized defence of life, liberty and property... But such interpretations are without any foundation. The anarchists emphatically favor resistance to and organized protection against crime and aggression of every kind; it is not greater freedom for the criminal, but greater freedom for the noncriminal, that they aim to secure; and by the abolition of government they mean the removal of restrictions upon conduct intrinsically ethical and legitimate, but which ignorant legislation has interdicted as criminal.

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy - which is their own population.

When men set up an imaginary Authority armed with force, they destroy all opportunity to exercise their natural freedom.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Among the political ideologies generally considered to be of continuing significance, anarchism alone has never been implemented. Perhaps its rigors are too strong and its advocates are too weak. That it is still considered worth studying is testimony to its intellectual credibility, particularly its single-minded emphasis on individual liberty.

Slaves and master do not make a society; "free and equal" beings do.

Is a little wet, still wet? It seems like a question with an obvious answer. But, for many, the correct answer—for which they argue vociferously—is that "a little wet is not wet." I am, of course, talking about minarchism and statism. Both are positions with designs for how society must be organized, guaranteed by the monopolization of the use of force and violence. Wherein they differ is "how wet" they are. Yet they want us to believe that there is much more than a difference in their respective degree of wetness. They claim it is a matter of principle, not of magnitude. From my anarchist perspective, this is at the same time funny and sad. A state is a state regardless of how big it is. It has a nature that comes from simply being a state. And this nature applies regardless of how you choose to measure its size or impact. This is important to remember, and it needs to be core to libertarian philosophy.

The study of complexity, or chaos, informs us of patterns of regularity that lie hidden in our world, but which spontaneously manifest themselves to generate the order that we like to pretend authorities have created for us. There is much to discover about the interplay of unseen forces that work, without conscious direction, to make our lives more productive and peaceful than even the best-intended autocrat can accomplish. As the disruptive histories of state planning and regulation reveal, efforts to impose order by fiat often produce disorder, a phenomenon whose explanation is to be found in the dynamical nature of complexity.

Unlike all authoritarian movements for social betterment, Mutualism requires no compulsory measures for its introduction or maintenance.  It is eminently practical, and can be adopted at once in ever-widening circles of social and economic life with great advantage to those who practice it; and it is based on a logical extension of the past history of mankind: the gradual evolution of free society.

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.

All the world's governments and central banks share a common philosophy, which drives these policies. They believe that you create economic activity by stimulating demand, and you stimulate demand by printing money. And, of course, it's true, in a way. Roughly the same way a counterfeiter can stimulate a local economy. Unfortunately, they ignore that, and completely ignore that the way a person or a society becomes wealthy is by producing more than they consume and saving the difference. That difference, savings, is how you create capital. Without capital you're reduced to subsistence, scratching at the earth with a stick. These people think that by inflating—which is to say destroying—the currency, they can create prosperity. But what they're really doing, is destroying capital: When you destroy the value of the currency, that discourages people from saving it. And when people don't save, they can't build capital, and the vicious cycle goes on. This is destructive for civilization itself, in both the long term and the short term. The more paper money, the more credit, they create, the more society focuses on finance, as opposed to production. It's why there are many times more people studying finance than science. The focus is increasingly on speculation, not production. Financial engineering, not mechanical, electrical, or chemical engineering. And lots of laws and regulations to keep the unstable structure from collapsing.

Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.

Voluntaryism is a realization about the nature of political society. The voluntaryist approach rests on the crucial, theoretical insight that all tyranny and government are grounded on general popular acceptance. The primary responsibility for the existence and continuation of any political system rests on the majority of the population, who willingly acquiesce in their own subjection.